Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship

Clotilda

MARITIME CURRENTS: HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY

SERIES EDITOR

Gene Allen Smith

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

John F. Beeler

Alicia Caporaso

Annalies Corbin

Ben Ford

Ingo K. Heidbrink

Susan B. M. Langley

Nancy Shoemaker

Joshua M. Smith

William H. Thiesen

Clotilda

THE HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE LAST SLAVE SHIP

James P. Delgado, Deborah E. Marx, Kyle Lent, Joseph Grinnan, and Alexander DeCaro

Foreword by Lisa D. Jones and Stacye Hathorn

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2023 by Alabama Historical Commission

All rights reserved.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Arno Pro

Cover image: Cutaway three-dimensional re-creation of Clotilda with captives in the hold, by Jason Treat; courtesy of the National Geographic Image Collection

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2151-2

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9443-1

Contents

List of Figures

Foreword by Lisa D. Jones and Stacye Hathorn

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Clotilda’s Final Voyage

CHAPTER 1. Maritime Mobile, 1519–1860

CHAPTER 2. The Twelvemile Island Wreck

CHAPTER 3. A Graveyard of Ships

CHAPTER 4. American Schooners and the Gulf Schooner

CHAPTER 5. Clotilda: An Atypical Gulf Schooner

CHAPTER 6. Clotilda’s Maritime Career, 1855–1860

CHAPTER 7. Shipwreck Archaeology

Conclusion: The Case for Clotilda

Glossary

References Cited

Index

Figures

I.1. William Foster’s signature on the final outbound manifest for Clotilda, 1860

I.2. Crew list for Clotilda’s final voyage, 1860

I.3. Captain William Foster

I.4. View of the brig Vigilante

I.5. Captain Timothy Meaher

I.6. SEARCH dive boat during survey operations on the Mobile River, 2019

1.1. US Coast Survey chart of Mobile Bay, 1856

1.2. Plan of Fort Condé de la Mobille, 1743

1.3. Cotton docks at Mobile, circa 1915

1.4. Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States

2.1. US Coast and Geodetic Survey chart of the Mobile River at Twelvemile Island, 1888

2.2. SEARCH archaeologist Joseph Grinnan mapping the stem of the Twelvemile Island Wreck

2.3. Site plan of the Twelvemile Island Wreck

2.4. Kamau Sadiki of Diving with a Purpose and the Slave Wrecks Project

3.1. Mobile waterfront, circa 1900–1910

3.2. Worker cuts up scrap steel using an acetylene torch, 1942

3.3. Section of the 1958 US Coast and Geodetic Survey chart of Mobile Bay

3.4. Sonar image of wreck 1BA702

3.5. African American longshoremen and stevedores train

4.1. Small fleet of schooners off the New York waterfront, circa 1865

4.2. Three-masted schooner on the Mobile waterfront, February 1909

4.3. Four-masted schooners loading lumber on the waterfront in Savannah, Georgia, circa 1905–1906

4.4. Auxiliary schooner under construction, circa 1915–1920

4.5. Gulf schooner Erenai of Mobile off Bayou la Batre, February 1911

5.1. Clotilda’s original certificate of registry

5.2. Small shipyard near Richmond, Virginia, circa 1865

6.1. View of a group of vessels in Havana Harbor, 1860

6.2. Harvesting sugarcane, Cuba, circa 1900

6.3. Tampico, Mexico, from the wharf, circa 1880

6.4. Panoramic lithograph of New Orleans, 1852

7.1. Side-scan sonar image of 1BA704, Clotilda, 2018

7.2. Archaeologists Kyle Lent and Alexander DeCaro examine a section of the centerboard trunk

7.3. Section of outer hull plank with treenail and iron spike plug

7.4. Section of threaded, cast-iron suction pipe from a bilge pump

7.5. Iron drift bolts

7.6. James P. Delgado and Stacye Hathorn examine registries and enrollments of vessels from the Port of Mobile

C.1. Side-scan sonar image of the wreck of Clotilda, March 2020

C.2. Alabama state senator Vivian Figures addresses the community

C.3. Wreck of Clotilda, circa 1912

C.4. Abaché (Clara Turner) and Kossola (Cudjo Lewis), circa 1912

C.5. Oluale (Charlie Lewis), circa 1912

C.6. Kamau Sadiki, Stacye Hathorn, Alexander DeCaro, and Joseph Grinnan survey the Mobile River’s ship graveyard, 2018

Foreword

When the alarm clock sounded on the morning of January 23, 2018, Stacye Hathorn, state archaeologist with the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC), awoke to breaking news that a reporter had discovered the wreck of the Clotilda in Baldwin County, Alabama. The Clotilda was the last known ship to bring captives to be enslaved in the United States.

The responsibility for stewardship of archaeological sites and shipwrecks in Alabama state waters rests with the AHC. The Abandoned Shipwrecks Act of 1987 transferred responsibility for nonmilitary shipwrecks and archaeological sites in state waters to individual states. The Alabama legislature passed the Alabama Underwater Cultural Resources Act (AUCRA) in 1999, giving the AHC responsibility for protecting archaeological sites in state waters. The unverified and unpermitted discovery of the reported Clotilda was a surprise to Hathorn and the management team at AHC. Although much sought after in recent decades, the location of the wreck of the Clotilda had remained elusive. Whether or not the shipwreck identified in the article was Clotilda, the location of the archaeological site had been published, making the site vulnerable to looting and vandalism, which meant that the AHC was responsible for both recording and securing the site as soon as possible.

Hathorn immediately began reaching out to colleagues in other federal and state agencies for advice and assistance, making phone calls during her commute to work. Upon her arrival in the office, she notified AHC executive director Lisa D. Jones, who immediately called together the AHC management team, and the agency began to gather resources and make plans for an unbudgeted emergency assessment of the shipwreck, which was potentially imperiled by the publicity. That morning, an impromptu team was quickly assembled to address the emergency. The team included the AHC, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the National Park Service (NPS), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), and SEARCH Inc. SEARCH Inc. is a private cultural resource management firm that reached out to AHC and volunteered its professional expertise and practical assistance. These volunteer partners united in support of the AHC at this moment of critical importance and began to make plans for an emergency assessment.

By early March 2018, the team was ready to assemble on the muddy banks of the Mobile River, following the development of a focused research design, the acquisition of necessary permit applications and approvals to conduct archaeological fieldwork, and community consultation with the descendants of the Clotilda survivors in Africatown. In advance of the fieldwork, the team conducted extensive archival research, and professional maritime archaeologists from SEARCH Inc. reviewed and analyzed maps and photographs of the shipwreck reported to be Clotilda. Based on that evidence, it was clear that the wreck was not Clotilda. The most telling evidence was aerial photographs from the mid-twentieth century that clearly showed the outlines of the wreck, which was approximately twice as large as Clotilda had been described in its registration. However, it also became apparent while conducting the background research that although this shipwreck was not Clotilda, it was likely a significant cultural resource, and one of several wrecks in what is known as a ship graveyard. The backwaters of America’s ports, rivers, and bayous have always served as convenient locations to lay up or abandon aging vessels, and these ship graveyards have important stories to tell about both the history of commerce in the region and the lives of the people who worked there.

In the field, team members waded through mud to map the wreck, snorkeling and scuba diving in thick neoprene diving suits and waders sealed against the cool March weather, the black water, and the adhesive silt. The dimensions confirmed the initial impression based on aerial photographs: the vessel was far too big to be Clotilda. Moreover, the metal fasteners and bulky timbers that composed the hull appeared to be of more recent manufacture, typical of vessels used in the early twentieth-century timber industry. Although not Clotilda, the newly named Twelvemile Island Wreck was a significant archaeological site tied to the ongoing maritime history of Mobile and Alabama’s forest industry and was, as such, the responsibility of AHC to protect, preserve, and interpret.

After the Twelvemile Island Wreck was recorded, the team turned its attention to recording the other wrecks that were visible at low tide in the ship graveyard. Archival records suggested that this section of river had never been dredged. Core samples confirmed this, which was exciting because the untouched nature of the river bottom there dramatically increased the likelihood of preservation for any wrecks embedded in its murky bottom. The team then met privately with the community in Africatown to share the disappointing results before publicly announcing that the wreck reported in January was not Clotilda. However, the integrity of the river bottom in the vicinity offered a glimmer of hope for future research in the form of a detailed professional maritime archaeological survey, using sophisticated electronic equipment, to detect wrecks in the muddy waters of that entire section of the Mobile River.

Over the past three decades, the AHC and others working under permit had funded surveys of the river and searches looking for Clotilda in other areas and found no trace of the wreck. In 2019 the AHC secured funding from the State of Alabama and Mobile County to contract with SEARCH Inc. to conduct a professional maritime archaeological survey that included the remote-sensing technologies of bathymetry, sub-bottom profiling, and magnetometry. This systematic, scientific survey was followed by targeted scuba diving in the zero-visibility river on each anomaly identified by the remote-sensing survey. The scientific method involves systematically examining and eliminating possibilities before drawing a conclusion.

Thus, the team tried to prove that each anomaly and shipwreck, in turn, was not Clotilda, and only after systematic elimination did we arrive at the only possible answer. What follows is the story of how the team arrived at the conclusion that it had finally identified the final resting place of Clotilda.

LISA D. JONES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE ALABAMA HISTORICAL COMMISSION AND STATE HISTORIC PRESERVATION OFFICER

STACYE HATHORN, STATE ARCHAEOLOGIST

Acknowledgments

This book is the academic product of a series of research projects focused on a previously unknown concentration of scuttled and shipwrecked vessels referred to as a ship graveyard. The ship graveyard is located on the Mobile River in a place long said to be the site where the notorious schooner Clotilda ended its final, illegal voyage in 1860. Most notably, we would like to thank the descendant community of Clotilda’s captives, and the community members of Africatown, to whom we extend our utmost gratitude as they have allowed us all to play a small role in aiding in the narrative of the people of Mobile River and the state of Alabama. We also thank Professor Natalie S. Robertson for sharing her thoughts and the detailed scholarship in her book on Clotilda and Africatown. We acknowledge and thank all the researchers who through the years conducted research and field surveys that ultimately helped find Clotilda, among them the Alabama Historical Commission (AHC), the City of Mobile, the late Jack Friend, and our colleagues at Panamerican Consultants Inc.

Throughout the project, which to date has spanned three years, we have been privileged to work both with and for the AHC. We acknowledge and thank Lisa D. Jones, AHC’s executive director and Alabama’s state historic preservation officer; Clara Nobles, AHC’s assistant executive director; Lee Anne Wofford, deputy state historic preservation officer and director of AHC’s historic preservation division; Stacye Hathorn, Alabama state archaeologist; Eleanor Cunningham and Dorothy Walker of the AHC; and Andi Martin and Jacqulyn Kirkland, formerly of the AHC; all of whose tireless contributions allowed for the research efforts to run smoothly throughout the entirety of the three years of separate but interconnected projects. The ongoing oversight and support by the staff at the AHC—and the support of the commissioners and the AHC Black Heritage Council, chaired by Frazine Taylor—are appreciated and were key to the project’s success. We also thank the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) Mobile District for its review and approval of a nationwide permit for the project.

We thank the National Geographic Society for its ongoing support and funding, starting with president Michael Ulica and archaeologist-in-residence Fredrik Hiebert. Hiebert joined the team in the field, along with senior electronics technologist Arthur Clarke, writer Joel K. Bourne Jr., and young explorer Asha Stuart. We also thank and acknowledge National Geographic’s executive, editorial, and media teams for their assistance and coverage of the project. The creative team behind National Geographic’s Drain the Oceans, notably Crispin Sadler and Phil Craig, supported additional work on the wreck and put the power of computer graphics to work to virtually represent, with a high degree of accuracy, the wreck of Clotilda in its watery grave. We also thank CBS News for supporting an additional sonar survey of the wreck site.

We thank the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP) of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), George Washington University, and the National Park Service (NPS) for their support of this project, and in particular, we thank Lonnie G. Bunch III, Paul Gardullo, Steve Lubkemann, Mary N. Elliott, Fleur Paysour, Kamau Sadiki, David Conlin, David Morgan, and Clete Rooney for their ongoing support and assistance throughout the various projects.

We also wish to thank our colleagues at SEARCH Inc., starting with CEO Anne V. Stokes and president James Pochurek, who approved initial pro bono work on the project, and the many who provided in-house support for the SEARCH field team: Serena Arbuthnot, Charity Moya, Greg Hendryx, Jeff Enright, Nick Linville, Janet Sanderlin, Emily Moss, Lisa McNeely, Michael Brennan, Latera Crenshaw, Kristine Santos, Christopher Altes, Shawn Joy, Raymond Tubby, Abigail Bleichner, Carol Rose, Rebecca Mattson, Katy Harris, Rasha Slepow, and Yelena Vilovchik. In the field, during the various phases of the three-year project, we were joined and assisted by SEARCH colleagues Raymond Tubby, Barry Bleichner, Timothy King, and Daniel Fiore, whose support and participation are much appreciated.

We are grateful to Alabama state senator Vivian Figures for her involvement with this operation; her dedication to the project is a testament to her character as a person, and to her deep regard for the people of the state of Alabama. We would also like to extend our thanks to reporter Ben Raines, whose ongoing enthusiasm led to his quest to find Clotilda.

We are indebted to harbormaster Terry Gilbreath and Mike Smitherman of the City of Mobile for access to the convention center boat ramp and parking lot for project vehicles and boats. Mr. Gilbreath also assisted with repositioning barges near Twelvemile Island to permit safe diving conditions within the river. The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, headed by Chris Blankenship, provided support and security during all phases of the three-year project. We wish to thank officers Jeremy Hicks, Jordan Kennedy, Thomas Harms, Joseph Dobbs Jr., Sgt. George Miller, Pete Mitchum, and Jeremy Doss.

We also acknowledge the contributions from the team at the University of Southern Mississippi’s (USM) School of Ocean Science and Engineering, which surveyed the Mobile River off Twelvemile Island prior to SEARCH’s project. The team’s postmission collaboration and data sharing augmented SEARCH’s survey with multibeam sonar imagery and—in addition to confirming shipwrecks previously charted by the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—provided a hydrographic record of these previously charted and other potential submerged cultural resource locations. We would like to recognize Monty Graham, director; Maxim van Norden, coordinator of the hydrographic science program and project team lead; Anand Hiroji, assistant professor and data lead; Kandice Gunning, PhD student and bathymetry data processor; Jennifer Rhodes, graduate assistant; Marvin Story, hydrographic technician and boat driver; and Ashley Boyce, graduate assistant and data processor.

We thank our colleagues at the University of West Florida, John Bratten, Greg Cook, and Amy Mitchell-Cook, who provided laboratory analysis and identification of wood samples collected at the wreck sites of 1BA694 and 1BA704. We are also indebted to our colleagues at the University of Southern Alabama who went above and beyond the call of duty by providing operational support during the project’s first phase.

Our knowledge of current maritime landscapes and the historic context of the Mobile River was enhanced by time and research generously shared by historian John Sledge of the Mobile Historic Development Commission. Historian John Cloud conducted extensive research in the archives of the US Coast Survey and the US Coast and Geodetic Survey and located key information.

The archivists and archives specialists at the Atlanta Federal Records Center of the National Archives provided access to original documents and official records. We also thank the History Museum of Mobile, led by Meg McCrummen Fowler, and research historian Charles Torrey, who opened the library and archives for research. We thank the staff at the Local History and Genealogy Collection at the Mobile Public Library. At the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, Georgia, we acknowledge the hospitality and sharing of research as well as access to both the Mobile-built Gulf schooner Virginia and the partially burned hulk of the CSS Jackson by executive director Holly Wait, director emeritus Bob Holcombe, and director of history and collections Jeff Seymour. They and their hardworking staff worked with us amid the COVID-19 pandemic and the arson attacks that destroyed Virginia and damaged the fantail of CSS Jackson in their ruined outdoor storage facility.

The final report on the identification of 1BA704 underwent peer review by Stacye Hathorn, David L. Conlin, Fredrik Hiebert, Christopher Horrell, Jack Irion, Michael McCarthy, and Kamau Sadiki. We appreciate their rigorous and detailed review, edits, and suggestions. We appreciate the review of the various reports and draft National Register of Historic Places nominations by the hardworking team at the AHC, including Stacye Hathorn and Lyn Causey as fellow archaeologists and nomination preparers. We appreciate the review of the nomination drafts by the staff of the City of Mobile and John Sledge. We also acknowledge and thank Dr. Jessica Hinds-Bond for her thoughtful and exceptional contributions as the book’s copyeditor. We also appreciate the peer review of this book’s manuscript by David L. Conlin, Greg Waselkov, and Wendi Schnaufer. Any errors or omissions in the text are our responsibility.

Introduction

Clotilda’s Final Voyage

The schooner Clotilda arrived off the Point of Pines in Mississippi Sound, just outside Mobile Bay, on July 6, 1860, at the end of a four-month, nine-day voyage (Foster 1890; Robertson 2008:63). The voyage commenced on February 27, when Clotilda cleared Mobile with the stated purpose of sailing to St. Thomas or a Market, with a declared cargo of 41,000 board feet (96.7 m³) of lumber, 18 barrels of whiskey, 75 barrels of flour, 46 barrels of beef, and 74 barrels of bread (US Customs Service 1860). As was both the custom and the law, the captain had signed his outbound declaration with a firm signature beneath the printed words, So Help Me God (Figure I.1). Instead of what he had declared and sworn to, however, Captain William Foster planned an illegal stop at the West African port of Ouidah, where Clotilda would forcibly embark enslaved persons purchased with money obtained from prominent Mobile businessman, shipbuilder, and ship’s captain Timothy Meaher (Roche 1914:71). Their intentions were a federal crime, as American participation in the African slave trade had been declared illegal by the Congress of the United States in 1807. Slavery, however, remained legal in those states that wished to retain it, and the booming cotton economy of the United States depended on enslaved labor. Ouidah was the home of Badohou, or Glele, the king of Dahomey from 1858 to 1889 (Appiah and Gates 2005:251). The slave market he operated was known to many Americans, so much so that a racist cartoon published in the North in 1864 depicted the king as a caricature, selling two small, struggling figures to two sharp-eyed Yankees with money in hand. Accompanying the cartoon was the rhyme:

There was an old King of Dahomey;

Whose Realm was more sterile than loamy;

So he bagged little n____rs

Which he sold at high figgers

To the Yankees who trade at Dahomey. (Stevenson 1991:xviii)

FIGURE I.1. William Foster’s signature on the final outbound manifest for Clotilda, 1860. (National Archives. Photograph by James P. Delgado.)

Meaher had proposed the voyage to Ouidah to his fellow slaveholders as a bet that, the law notwithstanding, he and his coconspirators could get away with the crime. As Emma Roche (1914:71) would later write, the wager was taken and the stakes were large. Several months after that bet, Clotilda, its hold packed with an unwilling human cargo, now came to anchor at an isolated spot, the journey almost complete. The crew consisted of thirty-five-year-old captain William Foster, of Mobile, born in Nova Scotia; thirty-year-old mate John M. Simonton of Portland, Maine; twenty-seven-year-old mate James S. Smith of Boston; and four crew members listed as Joseph Deflow, James Small, William Copeland of Mobile, and James Welch of Boston (US Customs Service 1860). Foster (1890) later stated the crew stood at 12, including himself (Figures I.2 and I.3).

FIGURE I.2. Crew list for Clotilda’s final voyage, 1860. (National Archives. Photograph by James P. Delgado.)

FIGURE I.3. Captain William Foster. (Mobile Public Library.)

The purpose of the voyage, Captain Foster would relate in a late-life reminiscence, had not originally been shared with the crew. As of 1820, with the passage of an amendment to an act protecting commerce and prohibiting piracy, participation in the slave trade was a capital offense. At the time Clotilda arrived off Mobile, 74 individuals had previously been prosecuted by federal authorities for conducting or participating in slaving voyages with the intention of violating that law, and others, while guilty, had been cleared of charges by sympathetic juries (Thomas 1997:774). None had so far been executed, but it was a felony punishable by death. The crew, Foster would write, when they learned of the real nature of the voyage, mutinied and demanded more pay if they were to be involved in an illegal slaving voyage. Foster promised to pay them double their agreed wages at the end of the voyage, although a later account suggests he may not have intended to do so, as his widow late in life related his belief that promises were like pie-crust—made to be broken (Roche 1914:85). In his own reminiscence, written later in life, he notes he paid his crew $8,000, the earlier agreed wage, at the end of the voyage. Now, anchored off the Gulf Coast of Alabama, the crew once again mutinied and demanded their extra money.

FIGURE I.4. View of the brig Vigilante, a slaver similar in size to Clotilda. (Library of Congress, control no. 2004667268.)

On board Clotilda, as Foster negotiated for the final time with his crew, were 110 people locked below deck. Foster had purchased them from the king of Dahomey at Ouidah on the west coast of what is now Benin. Foster had brought nine thousand dollars in gold and merchandise, and upon landing in Ouidah, had told local officials he wanted to buy a cargo of negroes, for which I agreed to pay one hundred dollars per head, for one hundred and twenty five (Foster 1890). That led to direct negotiations with King Glele. Foster and Glele went to the warehouse where they had in confinement four thousand captives in a state of nudity, from which they gave me liberty to select one hundred and twenty-five as mine, offering to brand them for me, from which I peremptorily forbid (Foster 1890). The captives held at Ouidah had come into Glele’s possession from raids on and warfare against various other cultures in southwestern and central Nigeria and Benin, and they included, in one case, as historian Natalie S. Robertson (2008:6) has shown, a Fon national from Dahomey itself. War meant wealth, especially when captives were sold as profitable commodities and exchanged for European goods on the Atlantic coast, a practice that dated back centuries (Smallwood 2007:27). Shaved, stripped, and taken offshore in long narrow canoes, they had been loaded into the hold of Clotilda, where lumber had been carried during the schooner’s five-year career (Figure I.4). A later account, drawing on the reminiscences of some of Clotilda’s human cargo, stated that the hole was better than most slavers, as it was deep enough to permit men of lesser stature to stand erect (Roche 1914:88). In these conditions, the captives on Clotilda made the voyage across the Atlantic, with former captive Cudjo Lewis recalling in late-life interviews and historian Emma Roche also stating that the people were allowed on deck when