The unpunished crimes of the Clotilda — and Alabama

The sun sets over Mobile Bay in this undated photo. The Clotilda, the last ship known to have carried enslaved men and women into the United States, left Mobile in early 1860 and arrived later that year with 110 men and women in chains. (Mindy Flanigen/Getty Images)

The Clotilda isn’t the most important part of the Clotilda story.

That’s not to say Alabama shouldn’t do everything in its power to preserve the rotting remains of that ship, the last known to have brought enslaved people to the United States.

Since the Alabama Historical Commission announced the discovery of the Clotilda in 2019, there has been talk about raising the ship off the banks of the Mobile River and putting it on display as a memorial to the 110 men and women kidnapped from Africa in 1860, forced onto the ship and sent into slavery in Alabama.

But an assessment of the Clotilda published in May found erosion and sea life had damaged the remains.

“Stabilization of the wreck, physical protection through reburial, and security are immediate needs,” the May report said.

Following that analysis, the commission said earlier this month they would preserve the Clotilda where it rests.

Saving what’s left of the ship should be the priority. The Clotilda could provide insights to historians and archeologists for generations. The state can ensure those future experts have a site to work with.

But as Jeremy Ellis, the president of the Clotilda Descendants Organization, reminded us, the focus should be on the men and women imprisoned on that ship.

“Until there is justice and accountability for this crime, any narrative or conversation regarding Clotilda and the site of Clotilda should be about the 110 survivors aboard Clotilda and the crime that was committed,” he said.

And this was a crime. And one with a peculiarly Alabama cast. It’s important to remember that as our state leaders do all they can to obscure the past.

I’m opening up “The Last Slave Ship” by Ben Raines, who located the Clotilda in the Mobile River in 2018. (Disclosure: Raines and I worked together at the Press-Register from 2007 to 2011.) As Raines writes, the story began with Timothy Meaher, a slaveholder and steamboat captain who (according to later recollections) made a $1,000 bet that he could smuggle enslaved people into the United States.

The international slave trade had been a federal offense since 1808, and a capital offense (piracy) since 1820. (The domestic slave trade remained legal through the Civil War.) On paper, at least, someone caught running a slave ship could go to the gallows.

So it was a risk for Meaher. But he had an attitude all too familiar to modern Alabamians. As Raines writes, Meaher “wanted to thumb his nose at the federal government in the most visible way possible, following a path of resistance to federal authority then being charted by several men Meaher admired.”

So the Clotilda sailed to Africa. Its crew kidnapped 110 people and made it back across the ocean. Raines says that historical records suggest that Timothy Meaher and his two brothers enslaved a total of 60 of the people. The captain of the Clotilda enslaved 16. Traders imprisoned the remaining people.

The captors forced their victims to work on local plantations in terrible conditions, inflicting violence. Cudjo Lewis, one of the survivors, remembered sleeping on brick floors, or hauling wood and feeding it into the fires powering the Meaher family’s steamboats.

After emancipation, they built a new community and named it Africatown, on land they purchased from Meaher. They raised homes and schools, and chose their own local leaders. Africatown grew to about 12,000 people by the mid-20th century.

But the community suffered as well. The state put Africatown residents into Alabama’s deadly convict-lease system. Paper mills that were major employers rained ash on the town and exposed residents to chloroform, a toxic chemical.

This is a familiar story in Alabama. Industrial pollution and regulatory indifference ravaged Black communities throughout Alabama.

But don’t forget the attitudes of the white men who committed this crime. A sort of glib lethality.

The Clotilda’s kidnapping mission wasn’t a secret. It was national news when the ship left Mobile. The white press not only reported its return but celebrated it. “Whoever conducted the affair has our congratulations on his or their success,” the Mobile Register wrote at the time.

Meaher was arrested and brought before U.S. Circuit Court Judge William G. Jones. The judge had not only gutted federal enforcement of slave trading laws a year before but was a personal friend of Meaher’s.

Jones let him go.

Meaher burned the Clotilda after completing its journey, leaving its remains in the Mobile River for historians and archeologists to ponder.

The rest of us should consider the lives of those who came ashore: what they built and what was stolen from them. And we should think about what it says about our state.

This was an Alabama crime. One where a group of powerful people decided to upend the lives of the vulnerable, all to make a vicious political statement. It’s a crime where the legal system made sure to spare the perpetrators from the slightest brushings of justice. Where the victims, and not the criminals, had to adjust to captivity.

I wish I could say the state has moved on from such inequities. What happens to victimized communities today can’t compare to the hell of slavery. But we still see powerful people in this state playing with the lives of the vulnerable, determined to make political statements, and ignoring the human beings under attack.

And they do it in the shadow of all the crimes of Alabama’s past, a long litany of innocent people forced to build their lives out of the wreckage the powerful create.