The unpunished crimes of Clotilda – and Alabama • SC Daily Gazette

The Clotilda is not the most important part of the Clotilda story.

That doesn't mean, however, that Alabama shouldn't do everything in its power to preserve the rotting remains of this ship. It was the last ship known to have brought slaves to the United States.

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

However, an assessment of the Clotilda published in May found that the remains had been damaged by erosion and marine life.

“Stabilization of the wreck, its physical protection through reburial and its securing are the most urgent needs,” the May report said.

Following this analysis, the Commission announced earlier this month that Clotilda would be left in her resting place.

Alabama decides to preserve the last slave ship at the place where it sank, citing the structural decay

Saving the ship's remains should be a top priority. The Clotilda could provide historians and archaeologists with knowledge for generations. The state can ensure that these future experts have a site to work with.

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

“Until there is justice and accountability for this crime, any narrative or conversation about Clotilda and the location of Clotilda should revolve around the 110 survivors on board Clotilda and the crime that was committed,” he said.

And that was a crime. And one with a very Alabama-like character. It's important to remember that our leaders will do anything to cover up the past.

I open “The Last Slave Ship” by Ben Raines, who discovered 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 slave owner and steamship 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 crime since 1808 and a capital crime since 1820 (piracy). (The domestic slave trade remained legal during the Civil War.) On paper, at least, someone caught operating a slave ship could go to the gallows.

So it was a risk for Meaher. But his attitude was all too familiar to modern Alabama residents. As Raines writes, Meaher “wanted to thumb his nose at the federal government in the most visible way possible, and followed a path of resistance to federal authority that was then being taken by several men Meaher admired.”

So Clotilda sailed to Africa.

The crew kidnapped 110 people and made it back across the ocean. According to Raines, historical records indicate that Timothy Meaher and his two brothers enslaved a total of 60 of these people. The captain of the Clotilda enslaved 16. The rest were captured by traders.

The kidnappers forced their victims to work in terrible conditions on the surrounding plantations, using violence in the process. Cudjo Lewis, one of the survivors, recalled sleeping on brick floors or hauling wood and throwing it into the fires that powered the Meaher family's steamboats.

South Carolina is home to the nation's first town run by freed slaves, and government aid is helping tell the story.

After emancipation, they established a new community on land they bought from Meaher and called it Africatown. They built houses and schools and elected their own local leaders. Africatown grew to about 12,000 residents by the mid-20th century.

But the community suffered, too. The state forced Africatown residents into Alabama's deadly system of forced labor. Paper mills, which were major employers, rained ash on the town and exposed residents to toxic chloroform.

In Alabama, this is a familiar story. Industrial pollution and government indifference have hit black communities hard across the country.

But don't forget the attitude of the white men who committed this crime. A kind of superficial lethality.

The Clotilda's kidnapping mission was no secret. When the ship left Mobile, it was known nationwide. The white press not only reported its return, but also celebrated it.

“Whoever conducted this affair, we congratulate him on his success,” the Mobile Register wrote at the time.

Meaher was arrested and brought before U.S. District Judge William G. Jones. The judge had not only undermined the federal government's enforcement of slave trade laws a year earlier, but was also a personal friend of Meaher's.

Jones let him go.

Meaher burned the Clotilda after completing her voyage and left her remains in the Mobile River for historians and archaeologists to ponder.

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

This was a crime in Alabama. One in which a group of powerful people decided to turn the lives of the weak upside down to make a malicious political point. It is a crime in which the legal system ensured that the perpetrators never had even the slightest brush with justice. In which the victims, not the perpetrators, had to adjust to imprisonment.

I wish I could say that the state has moved on from such injustices. What is happening to victim communities today cannot be compared to the hell of slavery. But we still see powerful people in this state playing with the lives of the weak, determined to make political statements, and ignoring the people who are being attacked.

And they do so in the shadow of all the crimes of Alabama's past, a long litany of innocent people forced to rebuild their lives from the rubble created by the powerful.

Like SC Daily Gazette, Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) nonprofit organization. Alabama Reflector maintains its editorial independence. If you have any questions, contact Editor Brian Lyman: [email protected]. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and X.