Though slavery ended in 1865, the importation of Africans as slaves was outlawed nearly fifty years earlier in 1808 with an act of Congress banning the practice. The truth, like most everything in history regarding race, is far from black and white. Environmental journalist and Alabama waterman Ben Raines sheds light on just how the ghosts of the slave trade, long thought well-buried, exist surprisingly close to the surface both literally and figuratively in The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. In his mix of history, detective story and plea for justice, Raines makes an already compelling story one that cannot be ignored in today’s racial reckoning.
The story of the Clotilda has been a strange mix of forgotten notoriety and open, shameful secret. The ship was commissioned by a wealthy Mobile, Alabama businessman and plantation owner Timothy Meaher who bet that he could outwit Federal laws and import captives directly from Africa and force them into slavery. The Clotilda, modified with a hold for imprisoning captives and extra sail for speed, set sail in spring 1860 from Mobile for the notorious slave-selling kingdom of Dahomey in modern day Benin. There Clotilda’s captain loaded 110 people into the ship’s hold and, dodging anti-slave patrols, eventually landed them deep in an Alabama bayou. The Clotilda was then sunk, destroying the evidence of the crime and seemingly laying the story of the last known slave ship beyond the reach of history. But the captives of the Clotilda survived and miraculously lived long enough to tell their own stories, an invaluable insight into the horrors of the slave stealing societies of Africa and the Middle Passage. Raines draws heavily on the research of Emma Roche and Zora Neale Hurston, both women who interviewed the surviving Africans who, after slavery, had settled on their former enslavers’ lands to form their own community of Africatown, near Mobile. With its governance based on African traditions and an economy that thrived in spite of Jim Crow laws, Africatown seemed to have a bright future. But as Raines points out vehemently, the specter of slavery and the close ties to Africa would bring about the decline in Africatown’s legacy both from outside and, ironically, within its own community. Raines’ discovery of the wreck of the Clotilda in 2019 closes the book, but the future for both the Clotilda, Africatown and the descendants of her remarkable survivors is far from clear.
Raines’ uncompromising take on the role the Meaher family, who still claim millions generated from Civil War-era wealth and lease much of the land around Africatown to industries that poisoned generations of mostly African-American residents, serves as a reminder how many still wish to see history buried. It’s obvious Raines is passionate about the Clotilda story and the history lurking in Alabama’s bayous. While it is hard to fault an author recounting this story to maintain an objective tone, Raines’ tone underscores that this is as much a personal story as a history (a recent review also raised some valid questions on factual accuracy in some of Raines’ claims). Still, Raines has something that many histories don’t: an important, timely story told with an urgency that reads almost like a thriller. Once this reader started The Last Slave Ship, it was difficult to put down. If The Last Slave Ship gets the Clotilda and her survivors the attention they deserve, Raines has done his job well. Pair it with Zora Neale Hurston’s essential record of survivor Cudjo Lewis’s recollections in Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’ (the audio version read by Robin Niles is especially recommended). Readers interested in a more scholarly and wider take on the illegal slave trade and its impact on world economies may wish to also read The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris.