Unearthing the last slave ship: A tale of suffering – and reckoning

The Atlantic slave trade was abolished in the United States in 1808, but in 1860, planter Timothy Meaher bankrolled a voyage that smuggled 110 West African captives into Alabama. His criminal operation was praised by a local newspaper. “Whoever conducted the affair has our congratulations,” the editorial read, reasoning that not only did planters require labor, but they were “civilizing and Christianizing a set of barbarians by the same course.” 

The Civil War erupted months later, so the ship that Meaher commissioned for the horrific task, the Clotilda, ended up being the last vessel to transport enslaved people to America. Meaher and Captain William Foster, who sailed the schooner on its four-month journey from Mobile to what is now the African nation of Benin and back, burned the ship and sank it in an Alabama swamp to destroy evidence of their crime. The Clotilda stayed hidden for 160 years, until journalist Ben Raines uncovered its remains in 2018. Now Raines has written “The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning.”

The gripping and affecting book tells several stories, and Raines deftly weaves them into a tight, propulsive narrative. He begins with Meaher and his brothers, who grew up in Maine but amassed their fortunes in the South. The Clotilda voyage grew out of a $1,000 bet that Meaher made after boasting that he could illegally import a ship of human cargo without being punished.

Aided by Foster’s written accounts, Raines reconstructs the ship’s journey. The Clotilda survived mutiny attempts by the crew, which had been hired without knowledge of the voyage’s purpose; the schooner also had to evade a British fleet patrolling the African coast to enforce international slave-trade bans. 

The Clotilda’s destination was Ouidah, in what was then the kingdom of Dahomey. The kingdom was notorious for attacking neighboring villages, executing the very old and very young, and selling the rest into slavery. Dahomey, Raines writes, “may have been responsible for capturing and deporting about 30 percent of all the Africans sold into bondage worldwide between 1600 and the 1880s.” In the late 1920s, author Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Clotilda survivor Cudjo Lewis, by then the last man alive who’d endured the Middle Passage. Raines relies on her work to re-create Lewis’ account of the brutal raid that led to his capture, imprisonment in Ouidah, and eventual sale to Foster.

The Clotilda captives were mostly divided between Foster, Meaher, and Meaher’s brothers; thus, they were able to remain in proximity upon arrival in the United States. Because the Civil War broke out months later, they were freed within five years.

After being unable to raise enough money to return to Africa, they created their own community, governed according to African customs, on the outskirts of Mobile. It came to be known as Africatown. “Unlike their newly emancipated American counterparts,” Raines observes, “the Africans already knew how to be free.” They began by renting land from their former enslavers, but eventually they saved enough to buy their own parcels. They chose leaders, established a church, and built a school. 

Africatown thrived for years. “By the 1950s,” Raines reports, “there were movie theaters, grocery stores, barbershops, restaurants, and twelve thousand residents.” But the Meaher descendants leased property to a paper mill and other heavy industries once the construction of roads and bridges made the area less isolated. The factories were initially hailed for bringing jobs, but before long Africatown was polluted and blighted. Those who could afford to leave did. 

Raines’ narrative shines as the story reaches the present day. As an environmental journalist (his first book, “Saving America’s Amazon: The Threat to Our Nation’s Most Biodiverse River System,” was a call to protect Alabama’s diverse aquatic ecosystem), he is well positioned to assess the devastating impact of industrial pollution on Africatown. The author is also a charter captain intimately familiar with Alabama’s waterways, and as such, he turned out to be uniquely qualified to find the Clotilda’s sunken remains. “The current was running hard and the river was so muddy it looked like chocolate milk,” he recalls of the cold April day when he dove beneath the surface and emerged with a plank of wood that belonged to the ship. 

The book feels especially timely when Raines assesses the controversies that continue to surround the Clotilda. The state of Alabama owns the wreck and has so far appeared reluctant to spend the millions required to excavate it. Raines speaks to descendants who hope to make the ship the centerpiece of a future Africatown museum. “Having the burnt, rotten hull of the last American slave ship on display would instantly make Africatown one of the most important sites in the burgeoning Civil Rights tourism industry,” he writes.

Raines visits Benin, where he writes, “Most everyone’s ancestors were either capturing or being captured as part of the slaving economy.” He finds the people there grappling with this history.

Not everyone is ready for such a reckoning. Descendants of Foster seem more interested in selling their Clotilda artifacts than donating them to a museum, and descendants of the Meahers have resisted overtures by the residents of Africatown. Raines manages to connect one distant descendant of Foster with members of the Clotilda Descendants Association, and in a moving chapter, he describes the friendships they form. Still, Raines’ use of the term “closure” feels premature. The story continues to be written.