Clotilda, the Last Slave Ship: Greed, Rebellion, and Ultimate Triumph
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 slaveowners 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 slaveowner, Timothy Meaher, would not be found out and prosecuted by federal authorities.
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.
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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 slaveowner 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 slaveowners, 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.
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