Uncovering The Hidden Lives of Last Clotilda Survivor Matilda McCrear and Her Family

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article uncovers for the first time the life story of Matilda McCrear (1857 or 1858–1940), the last survivor of the Clotilda, the last U.S. slave ship. Drawing on a newspaper interview with McCrear alongside genealogical data, this study charts her experiences from slavery to the Great Depression, and sheds light not only on McCrear’s life but also the lives of her mother Gracie, stepfather Guy, sister Sallie and two other unnamed sisters, who were all survivors of the slave ship Clotilda. The article has two key aims: to construct one of the most complete biographical accounts yet available of a female transatlantic slave trade survivor and, equally significantly, to create the first composite portrait of a family’s experience of the Middle Passage and its aftermath. The article highlights the lifelong injustices that McCrear and her family endured, but it also uncovers the sometimes surprising ways in which McCrear resisted the social and economic limitations of her place, as an African-born woman, in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. South.