The Clotilda: The Last Slave Ship, Its Survivors, and the Founding of Africatown

The Clotilda was the last vessel to transport enslaved Africans to the United States of America shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War. The descendants of this captive population created a unique settlement that is now part of Mobile, Alabama. The location of Clotilda’s wreck in 2018 brought extensive media attention and provided additional evidence to support the integrity of the stories told by the offspring of the transported enslaved people.

In 2018, the discovery of a wreck near Mobile, Alabama, made national headlines in the United States. Identified as the schooner Clotilda, the wreckage was not only the only slave ship in American waters but it also marked a scarce find as only 13 of an estimated 20,000 slave ships that have crisscrossed the Atlantic have been located. This is a testimony to this dreadful trade that made shipowners destroy rather than keep the evidence. The Clotilda was also considered the last slave ship to make the Middle Passage, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War and over fifty years following the date of 1808, when the United States made the slave trade but not slavery illegal. Locating the wreck tied together the descendants of the enslaved people, the Africans who sold the human cargo, and the offspring of the individuals who financed and transported the unfree laborers across the Atlantic Ocean.

By the first half of the nineteenth century, the Alabama metropole of Mobile had become the second-largest exporter of cotton, only exceeded by the port of New Orleans. The captain and shipyard owner of the region, Timothy Meaher, had placed a bet with his associates that he would be able, despite the federal ban on the slave trade, to return a cargo of enslaved people from the west coast of Africa to Mobile. He commissioned Captain William Forster to guide the Clotilda to Africa and back. In 1860, Forster guided the ship to the west coast of Africa to shores controlled by the then Kingdom of Dahomey, which occupied large swaths of the coastal area of today’s Republic of Benin. The rulers of Dahomey entertained European arrivals and provided war captives as enslaved people for transatlantic plantations. After concluding his nefarious business, Forster returned to Mobile Bay with 110 enslaved people. Sailing up the Mobile River under the cover of night, Forster met Meaher to divide the human cargo. Once unloaded, Forster steered the Clotilda further up the river, where he burned and scuttled the vessel to conceal the illegal activity.

The slaves went on to work in the plantation industry around Mobile. When Union soldiers freed them towards the end of the American Civil War, most of the Clotilda’s captives decided to return to Africa, but the cost made this endeavor impossible. Instead, they pooled their money and purchased land, ironically, from the same Meaher family that brought them to North America in chains. They christened their new settlement Africatown, with African traditions, leadership by a chief, and a school and churches reflecting values from their homeland. The descendants of the people living in Africatown kept the memory of the illegal Middle Passage alive. One of the last surviving male passengers, Cudjoe Lewis, even recounted his story to Zora Neale Hurston, but the American press refused to publish the vivid account. A clear difference between the survivors at Africatown and the Gullah was the abundance of cultural and linguistic African traces in the latter case.

Africatown, on the other hand, has many cultural and linguistic traces that were lost over the years, partially tied to the town’s development. Existing as an independent town on the outskirts of Mobile, the city had no running water nor paved roads. When the town decided to join the city of Mobile, the Meaher family, the region’s most significant landowner, decided to gradually tear down existing houses rather than subject them to expensive utility upgrades. This reduction in living space did not only cause African American-owned businesses to shut down but also caused a gradual exodus from African towns. The stories told about the descendants of the Clotilda kept the community together.

The absence of the physical wreck of the Clotilda technically did not devalue the stories told by the descendants that were brought against their will to the United States of America. For the descendants of the Meaher family, on the other hand, the potential location of the wreck was equivalent to the discovery of the body of a homicide victim. Meaher and Forster were both charged with crimes against the import of enslaved people and tax evasion, but without the Clotilda and its human cargo hauled from Africa, neither men were found guilty. Meaher kept bragging about his part in the story until the end of his life but also frequently lied about the final resting place of the slave ship. His relatives sought to dynamite what was left of the hull into the post-World War II era to whitewash the family’s involvement with the illegal slave cargo.

In 2018, maritime archaeologists finally located what was left of the Clotilda after a long search and even a misidentification. A year later, the Alabama Historical Commission confirmed the finding. Although the ship had been vandalized before and after sinking, archaeologists found its hull largely intact and surmised that decades of sediment had sealed the space below deck that may hold evidence of conditions that affected the enslaved people and DNA samples for identification. Although raising the Clotilda from its watery grave after nearly 160 years may prove difficult, a gradual unveiling of artifacts from its dreadful final voyage is a more distinct possibility. The unveiling of a new museum for this purpose—The Africatown Heritage House—is around the corner. With the location of the remains of the Clotilda, the stories told for generations about the fate of 110 enslaved people and their survival in Alabama gain a critical signpost. Similarly, the last few years have seen meetings between the descendants of the victims and the perpetrators, both Forster and Meaher family members, and individuals hailing from West Africa to promote intergenerational acceptance and potential healing. Rainer F. Buschmann

FURTHER READING:Delgado, James I!, D. E. Marx, K. Lent, J. Grinnan, and A. DeCaro. 2023. Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Enslaved Person Ship. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Diouf, Sylviane A. 2007. Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 2018. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Human Cargo. New York: Harper Collins.

Raines, Ben. 2022. The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of how the Clotilda was Found, her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. New York: Simon and Schuster.