The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning
Ben Raines
A half century after the United States outlawed international slave trading, Mobile ship captain and cotton plantation owner Timothy Meaher made a $1,000 bet that he could smuggle Africans into the country for enslavement and not get caught. Enlisting a schooner named the Clotilda, Meaher sent the ship to modern-day Benin, where the ship’s captain, William Foster, brought back 110 captives to Mobile, Alabama. With that voyage, the Clotilda became the last slave ship in history to bring captives from Africa to the United States. In The Last Slave Ship, author Ben Raines tells the story of the fateful voyage, of Meaher and Foster, and of the Clotilda survivors who, after five years of enslavement and despite all odds, founded Africatown after the Civil War. The book is an examination of racism, exploitation, slavery’s lasting impact, and how the Meaher and Clotilda survivor descendants’ lives still intersect today.
