Last Slave Ship

History in Five: What drew you to write about the Clotilda? How were you introduced to the story of the ship?

Ben Raines: I’d been an investigative reporter in Mobile, Alabama for twenty years and never once thought of trying to find the Clotilda. I’d heard the story. Everyone in Mobile has. But before I found the ship, a lot of people here routinely dismissed Africatown’s Clotilda-based origin story as myth, something the community made up – despite reams of historical proof that Africatown was started by the Africans who arrived in the hold of Clotilda. One day a friend called me up and said I should look for the ship, which was reported to have been burned 160 years ago in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, a 200,000 acre swamp north of Mobile. The idea of hunting for the last ship to bring enslaved Africans to America sounded outlandish, like looking for pirate treasure, and I told my friend so. But after we got off the phone, I typed Clotilda into Google and was quickly captivated by the hunt. I found myself thinking about where you could hide an ocean-going vessel in the Delta. It so happens that I run a side business taking people on nature tours in my boat in the same swamp. I figured I might stand a better chance than most of finding the ship. Ultimately, when I decided to look for Clotilda, it was because no one else was, and it seemed a mystery in need of solving.

Hin5: What makes the Clotilda unique in the history of the Atlantic slave trade?
BR: The most unique thing about the story of the Clotilda and its passengers is how well documented everything is, from the captain’s journal chronicling the voyage and purchase of captives, to interviews the freed captives gave later in life. The ship’s voyage in 1860 came more than 50 years after the U.S. outlawed the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Most of the enslaved people in this country at the time were born in the United States. This meant that by the end of the Civil War, the Clotilda’s passengers were some of the only people alive who had actually endured the Middle Passage sailing from Africa to America. Likewise, the Clotilda shipmates were some of the only people in this country who could talk about being captured in a slaving raid in Africa, or of the pain of being snatched from their families and homeland.

Additionally, most of the captives were younger than 20 when they arrived in this country, and 25 or younger at the end of the Civil War in 1865. A large number of them lived into the 20^th century and were interviewed dozens of times by journalists and historians. Because of this, we know more about the people who arrived in the Clotilda’s hold than is known about any of the millions of people who were enslaved in the Americas. We know exactly what part of Africa they came from, who captured and sold them, who bought them, exactly when they arrived in America, and what happened to them once they were here. The record of their experience illuminates and informs the lost histories of millions of African-American families who know only that their forebears were also stolen and shipped across the ocean.

Hin5: After the Civil War, the freed people brought over on the Clotilda united to form Africatown, the only town in American history founded by Africans. What is the legacy of Africatown, and how has the town changed since its founding?

BR: Africatown began when the Clotilda’s captives pooled their money and bought land from their former enslavers after Emancipation. The group, many of whom had been captured in the same town in modern day Benin, took turns building each other’s houses. In the words of Cudjo Lewis, the group set out to create “an African Town” where they could govern themselves according to the tribal customs they had grown up with. By the 1880s, they had added the area’s first church and a school for their children. Large numbers of newly freed American-born Black people were attracted to the success of Africatown, and began moving there, creating a new business district. By 1900, it was the fourth largest community in the country governed by Blacks, and the only one started by people born in Africa. By the time Cudjo, the last of the original settlers, died in 1935, Africatown was known as an idyllic place, with a mild climate and plentiful jobs at nearby factories. By the 1960s, the population had swelled to 12,000 and two kids who grew up playing baseball for the Africatown school were on the 1968 “Miracle Mets” team that won the World Series. Then things began to fall apart.

Mobile city officials and state leaders began conspiring with descendants of Timothy Meaher -- the steamboat captain and plantation owner who paid for the Clotilda’s voyage and enslaved the captives -- to situate heavy industry around Africatown, on land still owned by the Meaher family, land that had once been part of the Meaher plantation where many of the Africans were enslaved.

In the late 1960s, the Meaher clan tore down more than 500 shotgun-style rental houses they had built in the community. At the time, Timothy Meaher’s grandson, Augustine, told a newspaper reporter that his family destroyed much of the community’s housing stock in protest of a decision by the city of Mobile to finally provide water and sewer service to Africatown. “People have lived perfectly happy and healthy for years without running water and sewers,” Meaher said of his African-American tenants, claiming they wouldn’t be able to afford a water bill on top of the $4 a month rent he charged. “He don’t need garbage service… He don’t need a bathtub – he’ll probably store food in it. Wouldn’t know how to use it.” The destruction of the houses forced thousands of people to leave the town. Those properties still sit vacant today, overgrown lots scattered all over Africatown.

Then came the bridge and the highway in 1992. To facilitate the movement of 18 wheelers from the factories and the state port, officials decided to route a five-lane highway through the heart of Africatown tied to a gigantic new bridge over the Mobile River. To build the highway, huge swaths of the original properties purchased by the Africans from Timothy Meaher were confiscated through eminent domain. Descendants of the original settlers still lived on those properties, in the first houses built in 1870 by the newly freed Africans. Cudjo Lewis’s one room cabin was among the homes destroyed to build the road. A small brick chimney is the only thing still standing in Africatown that was built by the settlers.

The roadway also effectively destroyed Africatown’s business district, which was built in the neighborhoods surrounding the old two-lane street replaced by the highway. The city is a shadow of what it once was, with a population of around 2,000, down from a high of 12,000 in the 1970s and 80s. Though abandoned houses are everywhere you turn, revitalization efforts by a dedicated corps of Africatown residents have set the stage for a renaissance. The discovery of the ship can be the vehicle that carries the community there.

Hin5: How have Africatown and the surrounding communities responded to the discovery of the Clotilda?
BR: The discovery generated tremendous excitement in Africatown. When the find was announced, Africatown threw a huge party. The ship is viewed as both a vindication, that the story they’ve been telling was true, and as a vehicle that can resurrect the town and rebuild it from the destruction caused by decades of racist decisions and policies at the city and state level. Even today, there is concern in the community that the city of Mobile and the state of Alabama have done little to help Africatown celebrate its past.

With a museum, Clotilda and the story of her captives will be transformed into an economic engine for a revitalized Africatown. An Africatown museum hosting the shipwreck would instantly become one of the crown jewels along the Alabama Civil Rights Trail, which highlights critical places in the African-American story, such as the 16th Street Baptist Church and the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Clotilda is a similarly powerful artifact, the only ship from the U.S. slave trade ever found. In fact, out of more than 20,000 vessels that participated in the global slave trade, only 13, counting Clotilda, have been found, most of those being ships that sunk in ports. The pieces of a slave ship on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture come from a South African slave ship that sank in Brazil. Clearly, the wreck of the Clotilda is of international historical significance. Every effort should be made to help celebrate this remarkable story of human resilience.

Hin5: How does the Clotilda and its sinking continue to impact the descendants of those transported into slavery, the descendants of their fellow Africans who sold them, and the descendants of their American enslavers?
BR: The story of the Clotilda has been haunting the descendants of those three groups for more than a century. The power of the ship as historical testament is inescapable. The ship is history made real, and is forcing a reckoning. Now that it has been found, I see the ship’s power is global in scale.

For decades, some Africatown residents buried the truth of a past they were ashamed of. In the words of one descendant, “you were sold by your own. Then there are these guys making a bet that they can come over and get you. Why would you tell anybody that?”

The Clotilda’s legacy looms large in the Republic of Benin as well. Members of the Fon tribe there, the nation’s largest ethnic group, were responsible for capturing everyone who was forced onto the Clotilda. Meanwhile, members of all of the other tribes in the country, such as the Yoruba, have ancestors who were captured and sold by the Fon. The current president of Benin, a Fon cotton magnate, was attacked during the last election for having slave dealers in his family tree. That wound is still raw in society in Benin. I was humbled as members of the royal family of Dahomey – descendants of the king who sold the Clotilda captives -- wept aboard my boat at the Clotilda wreck site, begging their ancestors to forgive them for selling the captives into slavery. Their tears are evidence of a reckoning going on today, both in Benin and in America, as African-Americans come to grips with the role Africans had in shipping their forebears to these shores.

The white descendants of Timothy Meaher still completely bury their connection to a legacy they must be ashamed of. No member of the family is willing to speak on record about the ship or their family role in the Clotilda saga. Meanwhile, the Meaher family is actively trying to rezone more and more of their property in Africatown from residential to the heaviest industrial category, over intense objections from people in Africatown. What this story shows is that the past corrupts souls through the centuries, if we let it. Best to pull those old ghosts up out of the mud and into the light of day.

Hin5: What would you like readers to take away from The Last Slave Ship?

BR: The heroes of this story are the enslaved Africans who survived slaughter and bondage to build a community. The Africans demonstrated two traits as soon as they arrived in this country: they would stick together, and they would fight anyone who tried to harm them. They proved this on Timothy Meaher’s plantation just after they arrived, when an overseer whipped one of the African women. The rest of the Africans attacked the overseer, took the whip from him, and proceeded to beat him with it. That gets to the core of what allowed the group to thrive. Similarly, I believe the Clotilda captives were likely the first Black people to demand reparations from their former enslavers, doing so just weeks after gaining their freedom. The story of the Clotilda is one of loss and hardship. But it is also a story of incredible resilience. Anyone reading this history is overwhelmed by the brutality of the times, but also by what the Africans accomplished. That’s the true legacy of the Clotilda survivors. They overcame almost unimaginable adversity and banded together to create a community. They took turns building each other’s houses. They built a church and a school. They reconciled with their past and the people who wronged them, and they moved on.

The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

A Conversation with Ben Raines

The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning

A Conversation with Ben Raines

Get a FREE ebook by joining our mailing list today!