It was late April 1865 and more than 2,000 tired, sick, and injured men, wearing dirty and tattered clothes, filed down the bluff from Vicksburg to a steamboat waiting at the docks on the Mississippi River.
The city of Vicksburg was ravaged by the American Civil War, and so were the men who were about to board the steamboat Sultana. Almost all were Union soldiers who had survived the battlefields only to be captured by Confederate troops and sent to prison camps in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi.
Most of the soldiers were young, including some who were only 14 years old. Boys could enlist, usually as musicians, with their parents’ permission, but some enlisted as soldiers by lying about their age. Many of the soldiers had already been injured in battle by the time they reached the prison camps, and their situation soon got much worse.
