William Dunham Snow (1832–1910)

William Dunham Snow was born in Massachusetts and spent his life and career east of the Mississippi River, except for a brief period during the Civil War when he lived in Arkansas and got elected—vainly, it would turn out—to the United States Senate. He never took office, but his short stint as a politician in the divided and ungovernable state was his only claim on the state’s attention—aside from being aboard the famous steamboat Sultana on the Mississippi River in 1865 when its explosion near Marion (Crittenden County) precipitated the worst maritime disaster in American history.

William Snow was born on February 2, 1832, in Webster, Massachusetts, a small town on the border of Connecticut, the second of four sons of Josiah and Louisa Snow.

William and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Newell Snow, had three children. Josiah and Louisa Snow and William and Mary Snow seem to have formed a permanent generational partnership, moving around the country together—the father and son with collaborating careers. The decennial federal censuses from 1840 until Josiah’s death recorded the families in the same places—Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and also their sojourn in remote Arkansas in the 1860s during the Civil War. The two families moved to Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) and started a contracting firm that built telegraph lines. The fact that the telegraph lines benefited the Confederate forces in the early stages of the Civil War raised the specter that Snow had hurt the Union, which hobbled his political ambitions when the Unionist government set out in 1864 to fill the state’s vacant seats in Congress.

Because the Arkansas Gazette, other papers, and state government officials had fled to the safety of southwestern Arkansas when Union forces took control of much of the state, details of the workings of the Unionist state government at Little Rock (Pulaski County) for the rest of the war are scant in state media. The reporting and commentary were in the Unconditional Union and The National Democrat newspapers, both owned and edited by Unionist leaders. In 1961, on the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, Gazette historian Margaret Smith Ross began a nearly daily column in the newspaper, “Chronicles of Arkansas, The Years of the Civil War,” recounting the war’s events and impacts on Arkansas a century earlier. The columns, which recounted the political intrigues at Little Rock as well as the battles and skirmishes in Arkansas, lasted into 1965 and reported extensively on the intrigues by the Unionists, including Snow and his father, to send a congressional delegation to Washington DC.

Feuding Unionist state legislators spent much of 1864 wrestling with setting up the government. They decided to elect men to fill the seats vacated by Senators William K. Sebastian of Helena (Phillips County) and Charles B. Mitchel of Little Rock and also the two vacant seats in the U.S. House, all of whom had been expelled after Arkansas seceded from the union. The Arkansas General Assembly first elected William Meade Fishback, the publisher of the Unconditional Union, to one of the vacant U.S. Senate seats and Elisha Baxter to the other. The fact that Fishback had voted to secede from the Union at the secession convention in 1861 bothered many of the Unionists both in Arkansas and in Washington DC. (Fishback said he had only done so in fear for his life.) None of the victors in the voting for congressional seats in 1864 ever took office. Fishback eventually would be elected the state’s seventeenth governor—as a Democrat—and Baxter would be elected governor during Reconstruction but as a Republican.

When it was clear that Fishback would not be seated in Washington, the Arkansas General Assembly decided in December to replace him. William Snow, joined by his father, lobbied for the job. William got nominated and led the field of eight until the third ballot on December 30, 1864, when he finally received a majority. But the suspicion that his telegraph work had helped the Confederacy followed him in Little Rock and to Washington. He also was accused of selling slaves and speculating in cotton. Snow went to Washington, where he jousted with Fishback to get seated in the Senate. Both men claimed mileage reimbursement for their government travels in pursuit of the seat, but neither succeeded. Snow’s father Josiah persuaded a legislator to nominate him for the other Senate seat, but he got only one vote—that of the legislator who had nominated him.

When the war ended, Snow’s family left the state, and Snow soon followed, boarding the Sultana steamboat at Memphis to rejoin his family in the east. On April 27, 1865, at about 2:00 a.m., the crowded Sultana was ten miles upriver from Memphis, Tennessee, with men sleeping on deck or anywhere they could find space when the straining boilers exploded, blowing the ship apart. Snow swam through the swollen river in darkness to a flooded cottonwood thicket near the Arkansas shore and clung to a fallen tree near the cotton plantation of John A. Fogleman (forebear of the modern John Fogleman family of lawyers and judges from Crittenden County) for four hours until he was rescued by the steamer Silver Spray. Reports estimate the number of dead as high as 1,800, with hundreds of bodies floating in the river when Memphians awoke the next morning.

Snow graduated from the Columbia University law school in 1876 at the age of forty-four and practiced law in New York City. The short biography in Thomas Herringshaw’s book said he wrote poetry, notably about slavery; contributed to magazines; and invented things, including “a successful carburettor [sic], a gas-regulator, a thermostatic apparatus for the maintenance of equal heat for furnaces and steam apparatus, and a system for fac-simile telegraphy.”

William Snow died on February 11, 1910, at Hackensack, New Jersey. He is buried in Hackensack Cemetery and Mausoleum.

For additional information:
“Esperanza Trail Blends Arkansas History and Nature.” Arkansas Gazette, May 12, 1974, p. 2F.

Herringshaw, Thomas William. Herringshaw’s Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: America Publishers Association, 1906, p. 870. Online at https://www.loc.gov/item/10020683/ (accessed March 20, 2026).

“Horrible Disaster on the River.” Memphis Bulletin, April 28, 1865, p. 1.

“Memorial of the Legislature of the Free State of Arkansas to Congress, and Letter from W. D. Snow, Senator Elect, to the Hon. S. C. Pomeroy.” Washington DC: Chronicle Printing, 1865. Online at https://archive.org/details/memorialoflegisl00arka/mode/2up (accessed March 20, 2026).

Ross, Margaret Smith. “Chronicles of Arkansas: Controversy Develops Over Two State Posts.” Arkansas Gazette, February 21, 1964, p. 6B.

———. “Chronicles of Arkansas: Steele Returns; Legislature Tackles Job of Electing Two United States Senators.” Arkansas Gazette, May 10, 1964, p. 6E.

———. “Chronicles of Arkansas: General Assembly Names Snow to Senate—Question of His Eligibility Is Raised.” Arkansas Gazette, December 13, 1964, p. 6E.

———. “Chronicles of Arkansas: Congress Doesn’t Act on Representation Plea.” Arkansas Gazette, March 11, 1965, p. 8C.

———. “Chronicles of Arkansas: ‘Sultana’ Explosion on the Mississippi May Have Been Greatest Marine Disaster.” Arkansas Gazette, April 25, 1965, p. 6E.

Salecker, Gene E. Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana; The Worst Maritime Disaster in American History. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996.

Ernest Dumas
Little Rock, Arkansas