3 ms·

How is there that much uncertainty about the number of people killed?

• chiph 6y ago
  1865 - things were a lot more casual back then. No passenger manifests (or lifejackets..)
• reddog 6y ago
  The civil war was still going on although Lee had surrendered so a lot of formalities like passenger manifests were pro forma especially for military transport. The passengers consisted mainly of released Union POWs that were trying to get back home after years of hell in Confederate camps and they were in various states of health. The Union army had commissioned the ship to take as many of these soldiers north as it could carry and it was seriously overloaded.