One of the more remarkable chapters in Mobile County’s history begins with a bet. In 1860, Mobile shipyard owner Timothy Meaher wagered $100,000 with friends that he could defy the federal ban on importing enslaved people and bring a ship of captives from Africa to Alabama, decades after the United States outlawed the international slave trade.
Meaher, who ran his business with brothers Burns and James, hired Maine sea captain William Foster to make the run aboard the schooner Clotilda, a ship Meaher had built in Mobile in 1856.
Captured, Sold and Smuggled Across the Atlantic
According to historical accounts, the Africans aboard the Clotilda came from the Tarkbar people near present-day Tamale, Ghana, whose village was raided during a period of tribal warfare. Survivors of the raid were marched to Whydah, in what is now the Republic of Benin, and sold into slavery. Foster purchased 110 captives there for $100 each and carried them across the Atlantic to Mobile, in what is recorded as the last known shipment of enslaved Africans to the United States.
Federal authorities had gotten word of the scheme before the Clotilda arrived. When Foster entered Mobile Harbor on the night of July 9, 1860, he moved his captives onto a riverboat and hid them in the canebrake upriver, then burned and sank his own ship to destroy the evidence.
A Federal Case, Then the Civil War
The captives were distributed among those with a stake in the voyage, including the Meaher brothers and Foster, with 32 of them settling on Meaher property at Magazine Point, a few miles north of Mobile. In 1861, federal prosecutors charged Timothy Meaher, his brother Burns, and Foster with illegally importing more than 100 Africans for the purpose of slavery. The case was ultimately dismissed, reportedly because prosecutors could not sufficiently tie Timothy Meaher to the plot, though the outbreak of the Civil War likely played a role as well.
Africatown Takes Root
When the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished five years later, Meaher freed the group of Africans he had kept, and they settled together near Mobile rather than dispersing. The community they built became known as Africatown. For decades its residents preserved much of their native language and customs, settled disputes through a tribal chieftain named Charlie Poteete, and relied on a member of their community, known as Jabez, to treat their illnesses. Africatown remained a distinct, tightly knit community into the World War II era.
Much of what is known about the Clotilda’s survivors comes from Emma Langdon Roche, a Mobile schoolteacher and illustrator who interviewed Cudjo Lewis and eight other Clotilda captives for her book “Historic Sketches of the South.” Lewis, who died in 1934, became known as the last living survivor of the voyage and one of the last people in the United States who had lived through the Middle Passage.
Efforts to preserve that history continue in Mobile today. The AfricaTown Community Mobilization Project, formed in 1997, pushed for the creation of an official Africatown Historic District and for continued restoration of the community’s landmarks, a mission that groups in Mobile have carried forward in the years since.