Matilda McCrear, the Clotilda, and the Last Survivors of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

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The air was already a hot, humid haze by the time the sun began its ascent above the trees surrounding Mobile Bay. Daylight struggled to penetrate the density of the air; it certainly failed to cut through the thick pall of smoke lazily curling upward from the wreck.

Until very recently, the ship had been a large schooner, two-masted and nearly 90 feet long, far bigger than most of the scows hauling fish around the Gulf and the vessels making regular runs to Havana for sugar or to Mexico hauling crates of whiskey. Now, the massive schooner was almost completely burned away. The hull was barely visible, charred to the waterline.

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That had been the intention. The Clotilda was evidence of a rash of crimes, each one carrying serious punishments: evading customs, falsifying documents, smuggling, and, most egregiously, breaking the now 50-year-old ban on the importation of enslaved people. In theory, violating this particular law was punishable by death. In practice, not one person had ever suffered such a penalty.

Even so, the Clotilda’s owners weren’t taking any chances, which was why Captain William Foster had stacked seven cords of highly flammable wood in the hold and set it alight. The ship had been valuable - it was only five years old - but not as valuable as avoiding the attention of the authorities.

The ship that Foster was so keen to destroy had, until recently, held 103 Yoruba people captive. On top of their intermittent imprisonment in the hold during the weeks-long Atlantic crossing, the captives had been trapped in the Clotilda’s stifling underbelly for days to avoid detection by anti-slavery patrols inspecting suspicious vessels entering Mobile Bay. Throughout the ordeal, Zuma and Abache, Kanko and Shamba, Osia and Kossula, Yawith and Omolabi, Gumpa and Bougier, and nearly a hundred more had suffered, sang, sweltered, retched, cried, and survived. Seven people had not; the white sailors had thrown their bodies overboard for the sharks.

One captive, a two-year-old girl, not only survived her capture and the Middle Passage, but would live another 80 years after this particular July morning in 1860. When Matilda McCrear died in 1940, she was the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade that had, over the course of nearly four hundred years, brought more than 12 million African people to the Americas.

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Welcome to Past Lives. I’m Patrick Wyman.

Between the 16th century and the 1870s, more than 12 million people were trafficked from Africa to the New World. Nearly 2 million of those souls died on the Middle Passage, killed by disease, starvation, and the vicious punishments meted out by white slave ship crews. Rather than continue to suffer these agonies, many captives chose to take their own lives, refusing food or throwing themselves overboard, preferring the omnipresent sharks to whatever fate awaited them in the Americas. The Transatlantic slave trade was both one of the greatest crimes in human history and one of the foundational systems of our modern world. Simply put, there is no making sense of the 21st century without first contending with the fact and legacy of the Transatlantic slave trade and the Middle Passage.

While this colossal forced migration lasted for centuries, it didn’t last forever. The nascent abolitionist movement that grew out of the efforts of Olaudah Equiano and his contemporaries in the 1780s soon bore fruit: the British, the most prolific traffickers of the 18th century, abolished their slave trade in 1807, while the United States followed suit the following year. France and Spain banned the trade in 1818. Two years later, the US added teeth to its ban on the importation of captive Africans by declaring the practice to be an act of piracy and punishable as such. Brazil and Portugal, the last holdouts, legally prohibited the practice in the 1830s. To prove that these actions weren’t empty political gestures designed to assuage the consciences of those who had most profited from human trafficking, the Royal Navy dispatched warships to patrol the coast of West Africa, regularly intercepting vessels that were attempting to continue the slave trade illicitly.

As heartening and effective as these efforts were, they were nowhere near enough to stem the flow of enslaved people being illegally trafficked across the Atlantic, even to destinations that had formally outlawed the trade in human beings. The last captive Africans were transported to Cuba in the 1870s, more than 50 years after Spain was supposed to have abolished the practice, while the final shipment arrived in the United States on the eve of the Civil War. The last survivors of this horrific migration were still living in the early decades of the 20th century. When a blossoming generation of scholars and journalists sought out these elders—the last living witnesses to a centuries-long trauma—they were met with countless memories, and a keen understanding of the need to document them.

In today’s episode, we’ll focus on the last survivor of the last ship to smuggle captive Africans into the United States: the Clotilda, which arrived in Mobile Bay in July of 1860. Its passengers were the last known survivors of the Transatlantic slave trade. The last of them, Matilda McCrear, who was an infant when the Clotilda carried her from her home across the Middle Passage, died a free woman in Alabama in 1940. For those eighty years, the scorched hull of the ship that first imprisoned her lay just below sea level in Mobile Bay—a remnant of a past that cannot, and should not, stay buried or be forgotten.

Before we dive in, I want to talk a little bit about sources, because that’s an interesting story in and of itself. The survivors of the Clotilda first came to prominence in the 1920s thanks to the work of Zora Neale Hurston, whose novels and short stories about African American culture and experience made her one of the most celebrated and impactful figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston, a trained anthropologist, spent months interviewing a man known as Cudjoe Lewis, or Kossula, who had also arrived on the Clotilda: The resulting interviews became the masterpiece Barraccoon, a book that would not see publication until 2018. That same year, archaeologists discovered the wreck of the Clotilda precisely where it had been burned and left to rot away back in 1860. In the years since Barr accoon’s publication and the ship’s discovery, further work has dramatically expanded what we know about the vessel, its owners and operators, and its human cargo: The jointly authored volume Clotilda: The History and Archaeology of the Last Slave Ship sums up that work. For this episode, I’m also relying on the historian Hannah Durkin’s incredible book The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade.

Matilda McCrear was the last known survivor of the Clotilda’s final journey, but that fact didn’t become apparent until 2020, when Hannah Durkin’s work brought her life to light. Before that, a woman named Redoshi, who was interviewed and filmed before her death in 1937, was thought to be the last. McCrear was the youngest passenger to endure the journey: She was only about two years old when the Clotilda left West Africa, and a little over 80 years old when she died. Unlike Kossula and Redoshi, McCrear had far fewer memories of the land of her birth or the Middle Passage which meant she had less to share with the journalists and anthropologists, like Zora Neale Hurston, who emerged in the 1920s seeking the ancestral stories of a past that was rapidly slipping away. McCrear was taken at such a young age that slavery deprived her even of the knowledge that would have left an identifiable trail for later researchers to easily find.

The story of the Clotilda’s survivors began just before dawn one April morning in 1860, in a town called Tarkar, located in what is today southwest Nigeria. The farmers who in the cool predawn had left through Tarkar’s eight gates to work the fields of corn, melons, and nuts were already dead, killed silently by their attackers before they could raise the alarm. Most of the remaining townsfolk were asleep in their homes. Shouting and gunfire startled them awake; some, like 15-year-old Abaché, immediately jumped out of bed and tried to make a run for the safety of the forest. Redoshi, aged 12, also tried to run, but she was quickly caught: “I fought,” Redoshi said later, “but they beat me. I don’t know what they were saying, but it wasn’t good.” Women warriors with shaved heads chopped at Tarkar’s gates with axes and machetes and fired flintlock muskets at anyone who appeared to be resisting capture. A second line of male warriors caught anyone else trying to escape.

Redoshi couldn’t understand her captors because they were from the neighboring Kingdom of Dahomey, an aggressive, expansionist realm of warriors and slave-raiders best known for its famous corps of women warriors. The reasons for Dahomey’s rise and increasing antagonism were straightforward: The long-lived Oyo Empire of western Nigeria and eastern Benin had disintegrated in the opening decades of the 19th century, clearing the way for Dahomey to use its well-equipped standing army to terrorize neighboring Yoruba communities like Tarkar. Slave-raiding was far more profitable for the kings of Dahomey than selling palm-oil to European merchants; it also provided them with the firearms that made the kingdom a powerful military force, and the trade goods that made its kings and nobles wealthy. European demand for enslaved people continued unabated even after the slave trade was made illegal, and Dahomey’s leaders consciously exploited that demand to advance their own political agenda in West Africa. As with Moll and the Indian slave trade we discussed a few weeks ago, it was a combination of indigenous agency and priorities, combined with the demand for enslaved bodies in the Americas, that powered the slave trade.

The people of Tarkar were unlucky to live so close to Dahomey. They were well aware of the danger; military training was standard for the young men of the town, like Kossula, who spent his later teenage years learning to use the spear and bow. Faced with a much larger attacking force and no warning, however, Tarkar never stood a chance. The gates fell quickly to the experienced Dahomey warriors, who had plenty of practice efficiently sacking settlements like Tarkar. Kossula remembered that the women were too strong to fight, even though he was a strong young man himself. Hundreds of Tarkar’s residents were captured. The rest were killed, shot with muskets or cut down with thick-bladed swords. Tarkar’s ruler was dragged before the king of Dahomey and beheaded after refusing to become a prisoner. Many others were likewise decapitated, and the soldiers took the heads with them as trophies along with their living captives.

The raid was over by dawn. As the burning sun rose in the sky, the captives were chained around the neck with irons and placed in a long line to be forcibly marched for long hours through the forest. Six children accompanied one woman, then around the age of 30, who would later be renamed “Gracie” by her Alabama master. The youngest of these six children was just two years old, and it was this toddler who would come to be known as Matilda McCrear, the last survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade. The column made camp that night. The next day, the decapitated heads of Tarkar’s slain inhabitants began to rot in the sun and heat. The second night, the Dahomey warriors stuck the heads on poles and smoked them above the fire, an event Kossula was able to recall in detail more than six decades later.

After two weeks of marching through three coastal slave-ports, including Lagos, the future capital of Nigeria, the captives arrived at Ouidah, located in present-day Benin. Millions upon millions of newly enslaved people had passed through Ouidah on their way to the New World over the past two centuries. Kossula, Redoshi, and Matilda McCrear were among the very last.

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After several weeks imprisoned in Ouidah’s holding-pens, or barracoons, the captives from Tarkar were loaded onto the ship that would carry them across the Atlantic to Mobile Bay: the Clotilda. Compared to many of the vessels that had made the crossing over the past 200 years, the Clotilda was relatively small, a two-masted schooner weighing some 120 tons and measuring 86 feet long and 23 feet wide with a six-foot-deep hull. Constructed in 1855 by enslaved laborers at a shipyard north of Mobile, the Clotilda’s was an unusually large, deep hull for a schooner putatively intended for use in the Gulf of Mexico.

In its first years of service, the Clotilda officially carried sugar, salt, animal hides, cotton, meat, whiskey, and lumber on its many voyages between Mobile, New Orleans, Texas, Mexico, and Cuba. But the ship’s unusually large hold offers some clues as to its truer, darker purposes: Even in its voyages around the Gulf, the Clotilda could well have been involved in trafficking enslaved people from Cuba, where enforcement of the slave-trading ban was intermittent at best. In January 1857, the Clotilda arrived in New Orleans, its cargo unspecified. The local firm with which it was dealing had links to the slave trade; the very next year, 1858, members of that firm would be named as unindicted co-conspirators in a scheme to transport 300 captives from Africa to Cuba. Smuggling human beings in defiance of the 1808 US ban on the slave trade was common practice. Demand for enslaved labor was rising, not falling, as the United States teetered closer toward Civil War. The profits could be immense: Captives purchased for $100 in West Africa could be sold for $600 in Cuba or $1,000 in New Orleans or Mobile. Proponents of reopening the slave trade - and there were many, and not just in the American South - were perfectly aware of that math.

It was the hunt for those outstanding profits that drew together a diverse consortium of investors for the Clotilda’s proposed voyage to West Africa: Nova Scotia-born shipwrights, doctors and lawyers, some of Alabama’s richest planters, and a trio of Maine-born brothers, the Meahers, who had relocated to the Mobile area to exploit the demand for lumber and ships. James Meaher, the eldest, ran the brothers’ steamboat and lumber businesses; the younger two, Thomas and Burns, captained steamboats. Burns stood a towering 6-foot-3 and had recently received a vicious knife wound running from his arm to his shoulder, leaving a distinctive scar: The knife had been wielded by Burns’s steamboat clerk, just to give you a sense of the kind of people we’re talking about here. The Meaher brothers took the lead in planning the voyage, gathering individual $1,000 investments from some of Alabama’s most prolific enslavers. These men had already shown an interest in flouting the ban, having supported the pro-slavery adventurer William Walker’s attempt to conquer Nicaragua in 1855. There was a growing movement in the South to reopen the slave trade, supported by both economic incentives and the strains of the pro-slavery movement that would eventually lead to secession. The Meahers meant to capitalize on it.

The Meahers, along with the Clotilda’s builder and captain William Foster, prepared carefully for their scheme. They reinforced the ship’s masts and spars to hold a greater weight of canvas, allowing for greater speeds on the open Atlantic; after loading the hold with provisions, they placed layers of fresh-cut timber on top to conceal far more food and water than they could possibly need to reach their claimed destination, the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. Upon arrival in West Africa, the crew would use the lumber to build platforms for the captives in the hold. Foster came on board on the morning of March 4th, secreting in the captain’s cabin a bag of gold that he would eventually use to purchase the enslaved captives. Aside from Foster, the Clotilda’s 11-man crew had no idea they were going to Africa; that wasn’t clear until the vessel arrived at the Cape Verde islands off the African coast in mid-April of 1860. The sailors were, predictably, angry, since the voyage was far longer than they had anticipated, as well as much more dangerous, not least because what they were doing was completely illegal. Foster was forced to offer them double wages, which they accepted. Money always talked in the slave trade.

While the Clotilda was evading Portuguese anti-slavery patrols on its way to Ouidah, the captives from Tarkar sweltered and suffered in the horrendous barracoons, circular slave-pens with thatched roofs, high bamboo walls, and little ventilation. Matilda McCrear, Kossula, Redoshi, and the others in their group spent two weeks packed together in the barraccoons before Foster and the Clotilda arrived. Unlike the prisoners, Foster was received in style by the king of Dahomey; following eight days of negotiations, the captain agreed to exchange $9,000 dollars in gold, plus cloth and alcohol, for 125 captives. Foster inspected each one carefully, taking only the strongest and healthiest, as they had the best chance of surviving the Middle Passage and would prove the most valuable to Alabama buyers. The captain preferred children and teenagers, like 19-year-old Kossula, who remembered how invasive the inspection was: Foster had examined his face, stuck his hands in his mouth, and though Kossula didn’t mention it, had looked at his genitals as well.

It’s impossible to imagine the horror of the scene, which had played out millions of times at Ouidah over the past two centuries. Two-year-old Matilda McCrear was too young to understand what was happening, but her mother, Gracie, wasn’t: Foster selected Matilda, her three older sisters, and Gracie for purchase, but not Matilda’s two older brothers. She and Gracie would never see the boys again. Another young woman, Bougier, was separated from all three of her children, one of whom was an infant. A young man named Yawith was ripped away from his two children. That night, the Dahomeyan guards provided a large feast for the 125 captives before their departure, which only intensified their sense of impending doom. They didn’t know where, exactly, they were going, but it was clear that they would never see their families again.

The chains came out again the next morning, binding groups of eight men and boys before they were fastened with padlocks. The women and girls were roped together. Gracie carried Matilda, who was too young to walk by herself, as they crossed a wide stretch of marsh with water so deep that it nearly drowned the shorter captives. Then came the beach and their first sight of the Clotilda, anchored a mile or so out to sea, just a smudge on the horizon. The canoes that rowed them out to the Clotilda managed to avoid capsizing in the heavy surf, but the boatmen did strip the people of Tarkar of their clothes, leaving them effectively naked on board the ship. There was, however, a problem: Once 75 of the 125 captives had been loaded, the sailors on board the Clotilda spotted two steamboats bearing down on them. The ship, and its highly illegal cargo, had been spotted by an anti-slavery patrol. Only 110 captives were brought on board before the Clotilda high-tailed it. Matilda, tragically, was among them.

It was May 24th, 1860, and for the next 13 days, young Matilda and her fellow captives would be locked inside the hold: no respite, no breaks on deck, just unbearable and neverending heat, thirst, and filth of 110 people forced into close proximity with one another in a confined space. The Clotilda wasn’t as crowded as some slave ships - 79 of the 487 captives on board the last ship to arrive in the United States two years earlier had died of suffocation and disease - but it was still pure hell. Kossula remembered the thirst; Redoshi, then twelve years old, remembered preferring death to life; Matilda McCrear didn’t remember the crossing at all, but her mother, Gracie, told her that it was “evil smelling.” On the twelfth day, the Clotilda passed the final headland on the African coast before the open ocean, Cape Palmas in present-day Liberia, but a sighting of yet another anti-slavery patrol made Foster wary of letting the captives out on deck until they were at sea. Finally they were brought up out of the hold, so weak and drained that they could barely stand. Bougier, who had been separated from her children in Ouidah, later remembered “she can’t see nothing, just endless water.”

For the next 32 days sailing across the Atlantic, the captives were allowed on deck more frequently, but Foster scanned the horizon endlessly with his spyglass, keeping an eye out for more patrols. Anytime he spotted another sail, the captives were forced back into the hold. Any sense of time disappeared: Kossula thought the voyage took 70 days, not 44; Redoshi thought it might have taken a year. The horrors continued as they traveled: At least seven captives died at sea, including a young boy, Matilda McCrear’s cousin. Each one was unceremoniously dumped overboard and taken by sharks. . On the 37th day, the Clotilda passed the Bahamas. The danger of anti-slavery patrols rose dramatically, but Foster had a solution: He removed the additional sails and yards that had allowed the ship to cross the Atlantic so easily, making the vessel look like any other Gulf schooner. On July 7th, their journey was nearly at an end: they had, at last, reached the waters off Mobile Bay.

For Foster and the crew, trouble was afoot. The lookout who was supposed to have spotted the ship coming into the bay wasn’t there, and the sailors threatened to kill Foster if he didn’t pay them what he owed. Foster was able to calm them and left the Clotilda to rally his co-conspirators for the final stage of the voyage. The Meaher brothers arr anged for a steamboat to pull the Clotilda up Mobile Bay, with the captives forced to spend all day lying in the sweltering hold, with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. At night, the ship and its tug navigated the narrow waters of the Spanish River to avoid the customs post on the Mobile River; Foster and his crew eventually heard the eleven o’clock bell ring out in Mobile, and they stopped for good at Twelve Mile Island, well above the port proper. There, the captives were forced onto a waiting steamboat called the Czar and once again locked in the hold for a daylong journey up the Mobile River to a plantation owned by one of the conspirators, a man named John Dabney. Once the captives were offloaded, the Clotilda was set aflame and scuttled to destroy the evidence of their crime. The sailors who had crewed the Clotilda left the Czar for another waiting steamboat, the Roger B. Taney, fittingly named after the infamous Supreme Court Chief Justice who authored the Dredd Scott decision three years earlier. The double wages Foster had promised his outlaw crew never materialized; instead, he threatened them with a pair of pistols and told them to “hit the grit and never be seen in Southern waters again.” They were on the mail train from Montgomery to New York the next day.

The Clotilda’s arrival was known almost immediately, of course, and the local customs officer informed the Secretary of the Treasury, who ordered an investigation. A schooner doesn’t anchor itself in Mobile Bay and spontaneously combust, after all. As the investigation got underway, the conspirators shuttled the captives around in smaller groups to avoid detection by the authorities. The prisoners from Tarkar were in terrible condition, afflicted with parasites, various intestinal and skin conditions, and perhaps scurvy as well: Redoshi remembered eating grass before she was eventually given cornmeal and water. The captives were then taken to Burns Meaher’s plantation another 50 miles upriver - he was the Meaher brother who’d been gashed with the knife - where the survivors were finally sold. Day after day, the remaining captives were forced to stand in rows while potential buyers inspected them in degradingly invasive ways, and two by two, they were marched away from Burns Meaher’s plantation to their new lives of enslavement. This was perhaps the most difficult moment of all for Kossula, Redoshi, Gracie, little Matilda McCrear, and the rest: another forced separation, this time from the only people who could understand exactly what they’d been through together. A former Alabama state legislator named Washington McMurray Smith purchased Redoshi and another man, whom she was forced to marry. One of the Meaher brothers kept Kossula. Families once again endured the incomparably agonizing horror of separation: Matilda McCrear, her mother Gracie, and her 10-year-old sister Sally were all purchased by Memorable Walker Creagh, one of the largest enslavers in his county, but not Matilda’s two older sisters.

We in the 21st century know that the Civil War would soon formally end slavery for the survivors of the Clotilda and millions of others, but they couldn’t know that. The next five years saw them all experiencing the everyday cruelty and degradation of enslaved life in the American South: long days of brutal work, vicious overseers, severe punishments for escape attempts, and sexual assault aimed at producing future children for the auction block. The conspirators who facilitated the Clotilda’s journey and enslaved the survivors were never held accountable for what they’d done.

The Clotilda survivors lived on after the end of the Civil War brought emancipation to Alabama. A group tried to raise enough money to fund their return to Africa, but the amounts involved were simply too great; instead, some purchased a plot of land from Timothy Meaher, one of the brothers who had enslaved them, and established a new community called Africatown. In 1914, when the artist and writer Emma Langdon Roche visited Kossula, there were eight survivors of the Clotilda left. Roche reported that they still preferred to speak Yoruba among themselves, and Kossula had given his children both American and Yoruba names. Those old enough to remember life before enslavement worked hard not to forget what had been taken from them. Despite the passage of so many years, it was still difficult for Kossula and Redoshi to discuss the circumstances of their capture and transportation. Some survivors refused to speak of it altogether. Matilda McCrear may have been too young to remember much of anything, but she bore the trauma of the events like everyone else. Still, the Clotilda’s survivors worked hard to make good lives for themselves. They created families, traditions, and a lasting legacy out of the worst possible circumstances ever brought upon human beings.

When she died in 1940, McCrear was the last known survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade. One perspective might see her death as the close of a particularly dark chapter in human history, and that’s reasonable enough; when events pass out of living memory, a shift has absolutely occurred in time and space. But the legacy of the Middle Passage and the slave trade are still with us each and every day. The Clotilda’s prisoners were the last of millions who, together, quite literally made and remade the United States. What was done to them - not happened, was done, by people who knew full well what they were doing - was a monstrous crime at the time, and it remains a grisly stain on the soul of this country today. It will for as long as we as a country choose to ignore or deny it. Those who minimize the many impacts of slavery, whether they’re politicians or talking heads on cable news or content creators on social media, ought to be forced to read accounts like that of the Clotilda survivors, people like Kossula, Redoshi, and Matilda McCrear, until their eyes bleed. It’s the least any of us can do now in the present: To bear witness to the crime that was chattel slavery in America, to understand how it shaped the world in which we live now, and try to work against the myriad effects that have trickled down through the years. We—all of us—live daily in the shadow of history. It cannot be ignored or denied, in no small part because people like Matilda passed their memories of it down to us.

That’s why history matters.

This marks the end of our first season’s scripted episodes. I’ve learned so much while researching and writing these, and I appreciate you all joining me on the journey.

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Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

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