Lived in Carroll Co., Indiana prior to the Civil War. MILITARY SERVICE: Served in the Civil War. DIED: aboard the ship "Sultana." SOURCE: "Tenting Tonight: The Soldier's Life" by James I. Robertson, Jr, published by Time-Life Books, 1984. "Last Voyage of the Sultana "On April 24, 1865, the side-wheeler Sultana departed Vicksburg on the Mississippi River, bound for Cairo, Illinois, with 2,100 freed Federal prisoners of war crammed onto her decks. It was a risky undertaking. The Sultana was designed to carry only 376 passengers and crew. To make things worse, one of her boilers began leaking and twice required repairs as the ship churned north against a powerful, flood-stage current. Scarely an hour after the Sultana left Memphis astern early on the morning of April 27, catastrophe struck: The patched boiler burst in a shuddering explosion that ripped through the ship and shot a pillar of orange flame into the sky. Men asleep on the boiler deck were hurled into the air; they fell back into scalding water on deck or landed in the cold, swirling Mississippi. Coals from the ruptured furnances helped spread the fire. One soldier saw men "tossing their arms wildly in the arm, and rushing pell-mell" over the guardrail into the river. Another recalled the passengers "jumping from all parts of the boat into the water, until seemed black with men." Hundreds of prisoners, enfeebled by disease and starvation, lacked the strength to swim ashore; others simply by not know how. The Sultana became a floating inferno. "The whole heavens seemed to be lighted up by the conflagration" wrote a survivor. Yet still some hung on. The men who feared the water more than the fire clung to the rails, another witness reported, "until they were singoff off like flies. Shrieks and cries for mercy were all that could be heard, and that awful morning reminded me of the storied of doomsday of my childhood." By 3:15 a.m., no one on board the Sultana was alive. The ship continued to burn for another five hours before sinking in a plumeof smoke and hissing steam. When dawn came, rescue craft picked up men clucking onto anything that would float - cabin furniture, hay bales, mule carcasses, even human bodies. Truman Smith of the 8th Michigan Cavalry spotted four men riding downstream on the roots of a tree; they were singing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Over the next few weeks, bodies were fished from the river as far away as Helena, Arkansas, 120 miles downstream. The disaster had claimed some 1,700 victims - men who had survived the horrors of Confederate prison camps only to perish within a two-day journey of their Midwestern homes."
Robert was born at
Carroll Co., Indiana, in 1833. He was the son of
Jacob R. Shigley and
Sarah Hurley. He married
Sarah More on 12 August 1858. Robert died on 27 April 1865 at
Mississippi River, Tennessee.