Clotilda (slave ship)
U.S. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves enacted on March 2, 1807. The voyage’s sponsors were based in the South and planned to buy slaves in Whydah, Dahomey. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis was said to be a chief and the oldest slave on the ship.
About Clotilda (slave ship) in brief
The schooner Clotilda, under the command of Captain William Foster and carrying a cargo of 110 African slaves, arrived in Mobile Bay, Alabama, in July 1860. U.S. involvement in the Atlantic slave trade had been banned by Congress through the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves enacted on March 2, 1807. The voyage’s sponsors were based in the South and planned to buy slaves in Whydah, Dahomey. Cudjo Kazoola Lewis was said to be a chief and the oldest slave on the ship. After the Civil War, he and thirty-one other former slaves founded Africatown on the north side of Mobile, Alabama. They were joined by other continental Africans and formed a community that continued to practice many of their West African traditions and Yoruba language for decades. Some 100 descendants of the ClOTilda slaves still live in Africatown, and others are around the country. A memorial bust of Lewis was placed in front of the historic Union Missionary Baptist Church. The Africatown historic district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
The ship was burned and scuttled in mobile Bay in an attempt to destroy the evidence. The last 15 slaves had been secured on board, although only 15 saw a man o’ o’ war during the ocean passage, but were saved when a squall broke out off Grand Pines Point in Mississippi. As they neared the United States, they disguised the schoonser by taking down the topmast and the foremast and hoping to pass as domestic slaves in the coastal trade. They arrived in the US on July 9, 1860, and were taken down by the Abaco lighthouse at the banks of Bahama Bay, Florida, on June 30, 30 years after they left the ocean. The vessel was built in 1855 or 1856 by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile shipyard owner and steamboat captain, who in 1856 had built a two-masted schooners 86 feet long with a beam of 23 feet and a copper-sheathed hull, designed for the lumber trade.
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This page is based on the article Clotilda (slave ship) published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 10, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
