Clotilda: The Last U.S. Slave Ship

Unsung History

In 1860, on the eve of the Civil War, the last slave ship landed in the United States from Africa. The transatlantic slave trade had been illegal in the US since 1808, but Alabama enslaver Timothy Meaher and his friends were so sure they could get away with it that they made a bet and hired Meaher’s neighbor, William Foster, to captain a voyage to Africa. Foster and his crew smuggled 110 terrified kidnapped Africans to Mobile Bay, taking them from a homeland they loved to cruel enslavement in the deep South, and changing their lives forever.

Joining me in this episode is historian Dr. Hannah Durkin, author of The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade.

Our theme song is Frogs Legs Rag, composed by James Scott and performed by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons. The mid-episode music is “Slow Thoughtful Sad Piano (This Cold Feeling),” by Ashot Danielyan; the music is available via the Pixabay content license. The episode image is “Abaché and Kazoola ‘Cudjoe’ Lewis,” by Emma Langdon Roche from Historic Sketches of the South, published in 1914 and now in the public domain.

Additional Sources:

• “Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery,”
• by Steven Mintz, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
• “The Slave Trade Clause,” National Constitution Center.
• “Congress votes to ban slave trade: March 2, 1807,” by Andrew Glass, Politico, March 2, 2009.
• “The Execution of Nathaniel Gordon,” The New York Times, February 22, 1862.
• “Some Economic Aspects of the Domestic Slave Trade, 1830-1860,” by Robert Evans, Southern Economic Journal 27, no. 4 (1961): 329–37.
• “The Atlantic Slave Trade Continued Illegally in America Until the Civil War,” by John Harris, History.com, January 28, 2021.
• “Historical Timeline,” Clotilda: The Exhibition at Africatown Heritage House, operated by the History Museum of Mobile.
• The Clotilda Descendants Association
• “The ‘Clotilda,’ the Last Known Slave Ship to Arrive in the U.S., Is Found,” by Allison Keyes, The Smithsonian, May 22, 2019.
• “Last survivor of transatlantic slave trade discovered,” by Sean Coughlan, BBC News, March24, 2020.
• “Exploring the Clotilda, the last known slave ship in the U.S., brings hope,” by Debbie Elliott and Marisa Peñaloza, NPR Morning Edition, June 15, 2022.
• “Descendants of Alabama slave owner say they're ‘figuring out next steps’ to make amends,” by Anderson Cooper, Aliza Chasan, Denise Schrier Cetta, and Katie Brennan, CBS News, November 19, 2023.

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