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April 27
1805. In the First Barbary Wars, United States Marines attack the city of Derna, Tripoli. ("the shores of Tripoli")
1813. United States troops capture Toronto, Canada (then called York)
1861. President Lincoln suspends habeas corpus as a result of the outbreak of Civil War. Presumably, BEP's great, great, grandfather is outraged.
1865. The greatest maritime disaster in United States history. The SS Sultana, a steamship paddlewheeler plying the Mississippi river, is lost when three of its four boilers explode near Memphis. A few days earlier, the Sultana had stopped at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where Union soldiers -- many recently released from Andersonville and Cahawba prisons -- are desperate to return home at the close of the Civil War. With a legal capacity of 376, the Sultana has approximtely 2,000 men on board, mostly soldiers who begged or bribed their way aboard. Many who survived the initial explosions died of hypothermia or drowning in the Mississippi, which was icy cold with the spring runoff. No precise numbers are possible, but there were 500 survivors and anywhere from 1,300 to 1,900 casualties as a result of the disaster.
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