1860
THE CLOTILDA:
The Last Slave Ship
The schooner Clotilda was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States. It arrived at Mobile Bay in either the autumn of 1859 or July 9, 1860, with 110 enslaved African men, women, and children. The ship was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet long with a beam of 23 feet.
U.S. involvement in the transatlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Enslaved people enacted on March 2, 1807 (effective January 1, 1808), but the practice continued illegally, especially through slave traders based in New York in the 1850s and early 1860. In the case of the Clotilda, the voyage’s sponsors, based in the South, sought to traffic Africans from Whydah, Dahomey. After the voyage, the ship was burned and scuttled in Mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence.
After the Civil War, Cudjo (Kazoola) Lewis and 31 other formerly enslaved people carried by the Clotilda founded Africatown on the north side of Mobile, Alabama. They were joined by other continental Africans and formed a community that continued to practice many of their West African traditions and Yoruba language for decades.
A spokesman for the community, Cudjo Lewis lived until 1935 and was one of the last survivors from the Clotilda. Redoshi, another captive on the Clotilda, was sold to a planter in Dallas County, Alabama, where she became known also as Sally Smith. She married, had a daughter, and lived to 1937 in Bogue Chitto, Louisiana. She was long thought to have been the last survivor of the Clotilda. Research published in 2020 indicated that another survivor, Matilda McCrear, lived in Alabama until 1940.
Some 100 descendants of the enslaved people carried by the Clotilda still live in Africatown, and others are scattered around the country. After World War II, the neighborhood was absorbed by the city of Mobile. A memorial bust of Lewis was placed in front of the historic Union Missionary Baptist Church. The Africatown historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012. In May 2019, the Alabama Historical Commission announced that remnants of a ship found along the Mobile River, near 12 Mile Island and just north of the Mobile Bay delta, were confirmed as the Clotilda. The wreck site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021.
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