In this paper, a decentralized control problem is considered for multimachine power systems with nonlinear interconnections and disturbances. A direct feedback linearization compensator is employed to cancel most of the nonlinearities, and then a backstepping procedure is applied to deal with the interconnections and to reduce the effects of a disturbance that does not satisfy the matching condition. In this procedure, the disturbance is handled by using a smooth approximation of the signum function. Practical stability is achieved under the assumption that the infinite norm of the disturbance is known. However, even in the case where the infinite norm of the disturbance is not known precisely, the proposed control system still guarantees $L_2$ stability. Furthermore, the origin is globally uniformly asymptotically stable in the absence of the disturbance. A three-machine power system is considered as an application example.