Clotilda, the Last Slave Ship

By Joshua J. Mark

It began with a bet in 1859 and would end in a burning in 1860, but, for the 110 African men, women, and children who had been illegally smuggled into the United States aboard the Clotilda, the flames that engulfed it were only the beginning of their new lives as slaves.

The story of the schooner Clotilda, the last ship to transport slaves from Africa to North America, is a microcosm of the epic tragedy of slavery in the United States, illustrating how fiercely Southern slave owners struggled to keep the institution alive before finally plunging the nation into civil war.

The United States had banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, but this did not stop slave traders from continuing it illegally. In 1860, Captain William Foster of the Clotilda arrived in the West African region of modern-day Benin, purchased 110 people from the King of Dahomey, and smuggled them into Mobile Bay, Alabama, seven weeks later. He then burned the ship in the river off Twelve Mile Island to destroy all evidence and hoped that would be the end of the story, and his employer, the wealthy slave owner, Timothy Meaher, would not be found out and prosecuted by federal authorities.

The survivors of the Clotilda established Africatown, Alabama, & their descendants still proudly live there today.

He had nothing to worry about. Although Meaher's successful scheme to smuggle Africans into the United States became well known, he was never convicted of anything and, in fact, became a hero in Mobile, Alabama, for his resistance to what many in the South viewed as the unjust action of the federal government in banning the transatlantic slave trade.

However, as journalist and scholar Ben Raines notes, "The heroes of this story are the enslaved Africans who survived slaughter and bondage to build the first autonomous African American community in America" (xiv).

The survivors of the Clotilda established Africatown, Alabama, shortly after the American Civil War, and their descendants still proudly live there today.

Transatlantic Slave Trade & the Wanderer

The transatlantic slave trade, bringing Africans as slaves to the Americas, flourished between circa 1492 and 1860. It is estimated that between 12 million and 18 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean during this time before Britain banned the practice in 1807 and the United States government in 1808. Britain and the US then directed their navies to intercept any ship still engaged in the trade.

As many scholars, including Raines, Oscar Reiss, and Andrew Delbanco, have noted, just because the Atlantic slave trade was banned and engaging in it became a capital offense does not mean it abruptly ended in 1808. Raines notes:

By the 1850s, the thirty-six ships that Britain had assigned to its West African Squadron had captured sixteen hundred slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans en route to the United States, Brazil, and other nations where slavery was still legal. (29)

Slave traders simply outfitted and stocked their ships, and either forged papers or bribed officials, so it would seem they were transporting some other goods. Whatever had been loaded into the hold in the US, however, would be disposed of somewhere en route to Africa, the hold refitted for slave transport, and more people enslaved and smuggled back to the United States. Ships were built for speed to outrun those of Britain and, later, the USA.

The most infamous example of this was the Wanderer, a yacht built in 1857 at Setauket, New York, initially used as a pleasure craft by one Colonel John Johnson. Johnson sold the Wanderer to William C. Corrie of Charleston, South Carolina, a slave owner who, like many others, rejected the ban on the slave trade. Ever since the ban had gone into effect, prices for slaves in the United States had risen because the demand was as great as ever, but the supply had been cut off. Men like Corrie – and later Meaher – thought to resolve this issue by continuing to bring in slaves illegally.

In 1858, Corrie partnered with Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar of Savanah, Georgia, who took the Wanderer to Africa, dropping anchor off the coast near present-day Angola, and loaded the ship with 487 slaves. Six weeks later, he sailed up to Jekyll Island, Georgia, with the 409 slaves that had survived the Middle Passage and had them shipped to markets throughout the South.

Corrie and Lamar made no secret of their intentions. When the Wanderer was being outfitted for its trip, people in the shipyard knew it was being prepared as a slave ship, and, when it left the US, it was cheered by the people at the ports in South Carolina. When Lamar returned with his slaves, the federal government charged him with a capital crime, but, as the jury was made up of Southern, White slave owners, he was acquitted for lack of evidence.

The only penalty Lamar received in 1858 was a $250 fine and 30 days house arrest – but this had nothing to do with smuggling slaves – he was found guilty of breaking a friend out of jail to attend a party.

The Bet & The Clotilda

Meaher only wanted to show his contempt for the law banning the transatlantic slave trade.

Slave owners, like Meaher, celebrated the acquittal of Lamar, and one night, in April of 1859, while Meaher was entertaining guests aboard one of his steamboats, he bet $1000 that he could smuggle slaves into the United States within two years and no federal authorities would touch him. Meaher did not need the thousand dollars – he was fabulously wealthy through the cotton and slave trade – he only wanted to show his contempt for the law banning the transatlantic slave trade.

Meaher hired Foster as captain, and Foster gathered a crew, but told none of them that they were about to engage in a crime punishable by death. The Clotilda was 86 feet (26 m) long with a small hold, built for speed with a copper-encased hull, and had been constructed by Meaher for transporting lumber. Foster, a master shipwright, refitted the schooner with a false deck, loaded the ship with lumber, which hid the large cisterns of water and food supplies necessary for the voyage to Africa, and, with Meaher's help, obtained the necessary documentation claiming he was transporting lumber and other goods to the Caribbean. The ship left port on 4 March 1860.

The voyage was problematic from the start. The ship continually drifted off course, even though Foster was steering by the compass. Four days into the journey, he realized the problem: just as he had hidden the large amount of provisions from the crew, he had also had to hide the $9000 in gold Meaher had given him for the purchase of the slaves. This gold was in proximity to the compass and affected its magnetic field.

Foster moved the gold and solved the problem, but then the ship was caught in a storm off Bermuda, which severely damaged it. Foster had to put into port in the West Indies, and, by this time, the crew had figured out the true purpose of the voyage and threatened to mutiny. Foster promised to pay them double their salary as soon as they were back in the US, and they agreed to stay on. They never received the larger amount, however, as one of Foster's favorite sayings was "Promises were like piecrust – made to be broken" (Raines, 35).

Upon reaching Dahomey, Foster presented the king with gifts and negotiated for the sale of 125 people he held as prisoners. Foster had loaded 110 aboard the Clotilda when he saw two ships out at sea and, fearing he would be caught, left the rest and set sail for the USA.

The Burning & Africatown

Foster arrived back in Alabama on 9 July 1860. He docked the ship, contacted Meaher, unloaded his "cargo" onto a steamboat, and then had the Clotilda taken upriver to just off Twelve Mile Island, where he burned it to destroy any evidence of the trip. He was then paid by Meaher, paid his crew, and went back to his life.

The 110 captives were sold or given to Meaher's partners in the Clotilda venture. Meaher kept 30 of them for himself, putting them to work on his lands and in his businesses in Mobile. News of Meaher's "triumph" spread quickly and, as with Lamar and the Wanderer, he became a local hero. Federal authorities indicted both Meaher and Foster on charges of illegal importation of slaves, but there was no ship that could serve as evidence, no ship's manifest, no witnesses, no documentation of any kind. The case was dismissed for lack of evidence, and, with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the Clotilda was forgotten. In time, many came to regard the story as legend.

After the Civil War, when the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, the 30 slaves owned by Meaher were freed but continued to work for him, only now for pay. They saved some of this money and purchased land from Meaher, establishing the community they at first called African Town, later known as Africatown, as it still is today. The people spoke their native tongue, dressed in traditional attire, and organized the structure of the town and its government on that of their own villages back in Africa.

Among the original founders were Kossola (Cudjo Lewis) and Redoshi (Sally Smith). Author Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Kossola at length in 1927 and 1928 for her book on the Clotilda, Barracoon, completed in 1931. No publisher was interested in the story, however, and the manuscript remained unpublished until 2018. Other authors wrote on the Clotilda, including Emma Langdon Roche, who published Historical Sketches of the South in 1914 drawing on interviews with eight of the Clotilda survivors, but the story continued to be largely regarded as myth until journalist-scholar Ben Raines located the wreck of the ship in the lower Mobile-Tensaw Delta in 2018 and its identity was confirmed by the Alabama Historical Commission in May 2019.

Conclusion

Africatown developed quickly as a successful Black community of 12,000 residents in the late 19th century.

By the early 20th century, it was the "fourth largest community in the nation governed by African Americans" (Raines, xiii). Industries in Africatown included paper and lumber mills, and the town supported the growth of movie theaters, restaurants, shops, cafes, and many other businesses. In time, however, this prosperity waned, and primarily due to the descendants of Timothy Meaher, as Raines notes: Today, Africatown is on the brink of disappearing. All the businesses and most of the people are gone. Fewer than two thousand people live in the old neighborhoods. The Meahers, the same family that removed the Clotilda passengers from Africa, have in effect continued to oppress their descendants into the twentieth century. Deciding to get out of the house rental business after nearly a century as one of Africatown's most prominent landlords, the Meaher family suddenly bulldozed hundreds of rental properties they had built, destroying much of Africatown's housing stock, rendering entire city blocks into vacant lots. (xiii)

The Meaher family also sold surrounding land to industries, which cause air, light, and noise pollution in Africatown, and a major highway nearby contributes further to all three. The community today has become part of the city of Mobile, but many of the residents continue to insist on their autonomy and, by remembering and telling the story of the Clotilda, embrace and preserve their history.

Africatown Heritage House opened in 2023, featuring Clotilda: The Exhibition, displaying pieces of the ship and inviting visitors to learn how the "legend" of the Clotilda was not a myth at all, but a reality made possible by greed and racism. Even so, all the Fosters and Meahers could not crush the spirit of the survivors of the Clotilda, and their descendants, and others of Africatown, carry on in that same spirit today.

Bibliography

Africatown Heritage House: Mobile County accessed 28 Aug 2025.

Clotilda: The Exhibition, accessed 28 Aug 2025.

Delbanco, A. The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the

Revolution to the Civil War. Penguin Books, 2019.

Raines, B. The Last Slave Ship. Simon & Schuster, 2023.

Rawley, J. A & Behrendt, S. D. The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History. University of Nebraska Press,

2009.

Reiss, O. Blacks in Colonial America. McFarland Publishing, 2006.