The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning by Ben Raines

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning by Ben Raines Marsha Hamilton The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning. By Ben Raines. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022. 304 pp. $27.99. ISBN 978–1-9821–3604–8. The story of the Clotilda, the last known ship engaged in the illegal slave trade to bring kidnapped Africans to the United States, has long been part of the lore of the Mobile region. Not only did Timothy Meaher, the ship’s owner and instigator of the voyage, and William Foster, the captain, write about their involvement, there were newspaper articles published throughout the country and several court cases. In addition, local writers, such as Emma Langdon Roche and Mary McNeil Scott Fenollosa, and scholars, such as Booker T. Washington and Zora Neale Hurston, met and spoke with the Clotilda survivors and their descendants. Yet over the decades, many people questioned the story. In 2018, the author Ben Raines and a team from the University of Southern Mississippi, discovered the wreck of the Clotilda. When the identity of the ship was confirmed in 2019, it generated enormous interest, not just in Alabama. Articles and news stories have appeared in Smithsonian magazine (2019), National Geographic (2021), the New York Times (2021), and on National Public Radio (2022), among others. In addition, the Africatown descendants’ community is [End Page 345] the subject of an award-winning documentary, Descendant, which premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The discovery has also spurred Mobile County, the City of Mobile, the Alabama Historical Commission, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and many other groups and institutions to work with the Clotilda Descendants Association and the Africatown Advisory Council to construct the Africatown Heritage House which will host exhibits and programs to tell the story of the Clotilda; the people who were captured, transported across the Atlantic, and enslaved; Africatown, the community they created after emancipation; and their descendants. The Last Slave Ship is Raines’s contribution to the outpouring of literature about the ship and voyage, the captives, and their descendants. The first two chapters focus on Meaher, Foster, the origins of the voyage, and the ship’s arrival in Ouidah, Dahomey (now Benin). The next three chapters discuss Dahomey, Foster’s negotiations with the kingdom’s leaders, the attack on one village (the home of Cudjo Lewis, although many of the captives came from other towns and regions), Foster’s selection of his “cargo” in the barracoon, and the voyage back to Alabama. Chapters six and seven focus on the enslavement of the Africans, the tactics employed by Meaher and his co-conspirators to hide the origins of the newly enslaved workers, and their lives in slavery. Chapters eight and nine chronicle the establishment and history of Africatown and chapters ten and eleven focus on the discovery of the Clotilda and the effect that had on the descendants, Africatown, and the larger national and international community. The final two chapters recount the author’s trip to Benin and the meeting between one of Foster’s descendants and the Africatown community. The book is a good introduction to the story of the Clotilda, the captives, and their descendants. It is a popular history, written for a general audience. The first seven chapters recount a familiar story to those who have read other works on the Clotilda and Africatown, such as Sylviane Diouf’s Dreams of Africa in Alabama (Oxford, UK, 2007), Natalie Robertson’s The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of Africa-Town, [End Page 346] USA (Westport, CT, 2008), or Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon (New York, NY, 2018). Raines has done his own research, however, and references the contemporary newspaper accounts as well as Foster’s manuscript (in the Mobile Public Library) as well as other document collections at Spring Hill College, the University of South Alabama, and the National Archives in Atlanta. The most original contribution of the book comes in the final five chapters and the coda. Here, Raines focuses on the growth, development, and decline of Africatown...