This is a guest opinion column

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal (Cameron McWhirter’s “It Was the Last Slave Ship to Reach the U.S. Or Was It a Hoax?,” July 6) gave credence to an unfounded claim that the 1860 voyage of the slave ship Clotilda to Mobile, Alabama did not happen at all.

There is no question here. The evidence is overwhelming. A rudimentary review of the eight or more books published on the subject shows that the threshold for scholarly, historical credulity has been met many times over.

I join other historians in insisting on the veracity of the Clotilda’s final voyage. My hope in doing so is that attention may rightly go elsewhere. We ought to be remembering the remarkable stories of the survivors, celebrating their resistance and resilience and the remarkable community they established in Africatown. We ought to be listening to descendants, and revitalizing Africatown, and forging a future.

We ought to believe the survivors when they tell us what happened to them.

Below is an index of the major sources – and there are many more – that give a sense of the breadth and depth of evidence for the voyage: Timothy Meaher and ship captain William Foster brought more than one hundred Africans to Mobile aboard the Clotilda in early July 1860, and some among them went on to found the community of Africatown.

Newspaper articles: Within days of the schooner’s arrival in Mobile, at least 58 newspapers across the South and as far as Ohio and Wisconsin reported that over 100 Africans had been brought to Mobile Bay. (See Durkin 2024, 299-300 for a complete list.)

First-hand accounts.

From their various perspectives, these accounts corroborate each other and align in the major events of the narrative:

• Nine shipmates – Kossola (Cudjo Lewis), Kupollee (Pollee Allen), Ar-Zuma (Zuma Livingston), Abake (Clara Turner Aunspaugh), Oluwale/Osia (Charlie Lewis), Osia/Oluwale (Osia Keeby), Kanko (Lottie Dennison), Monabee/Omolabi (Katie Cooper), and Shamba (Shamba Wigfall) – gave detailed interviews to Mobile author Emma Langdon Roche, who published them in Historical Sketches of the South (1914). The African shipmates recount how William Foster chose them in the barracoon in Ouidah and how the Clotilda made a rapid departure from the West African port. After the horrific voyage, they describe Timothy Meaher meeting the Clotilda upon its landing. They remember being forced to hide in the canebrakes of the Mobile delta and then on John Dabney’s plantation. They detail many interactions with Meaher over the next thirty years, including Meaher’s refusal to fund their voyage back to Africa and his efforts to block their voting in an election.
• Kossola (Cudjo Lewis) gave a first-person account of his life’s story to renowned author Zora Neale Hurston, who recorded his account in Barracoon (completed 1931, published 2018). In detail, Kossola recounts being captured by Dahomey warriors, being marched to Ouidah, encountering William Foster in the barracoons, being loaded onto the Clotilda, surviving the voyage, and arriving in Mobile near Twelve-Mile Island. He recalls meeting Timothy Meaher before ever disembarking the Clotilda, and subsequently being hidden in the canebrakes of the Mobile delta for many days. His account continues through enslavement and emancipation, through the establishment of Africatown and into his old age. He knew Timothy Meaher for over three decades and held him responsible for bringing his shipmates to Mobile from Africa.
• Captain William Foster left a detailed, day-by-day account of the voyage of the Clotilda. Written in 1890, he recounted loading the ship in the port of Mobile, avoiding a mutiny, encountering multi-day storms, and stopping for repairs in Cape Verde off the coast of Africa. He describes arriving in the Port of Ouidah; meeting Akodé, nephew of King Glélé; choosing the captives; evading a Portuguese “Man of War” in their voyage back across the Atlantic; arriving in Mobile in cover of darkness; and burning the ship. (In the collection of the Mobile Public Library.)
• Timothy Meaher, who funded and organized the last voyage of the Clotilda, gave a lengthy account of his responsibility for the last voyage of the Clotilda. It was published in at least two newspapers on November 30, 1890.
• An American-born man named Noah Hart, enslaved by Timothy Meaher, corroborates their story in an account given to Mobile writer Mary McNeil Scott, published in Fetter’s Southern Magazine (1893). Noah was with Timothy Meaher when Meaher received news that the Clotilda had arrived, and Noah took food to the captives who were hiding in the canebrakes. Some of them were subsequently enslaved with him on Meaher’s plantation, and they kept in touch for decades to come. This matches Meaher’s account of how he received the news and then that he left the African captives with some trusted men.  
• James Dennison, another American-born man enslaved by Timothy Meaher, also corroborates the story. He told Emma Langdon Roche of how he helped Timothy Meaher tow the Clotilda into Twelve Mile Island and stayed with the captives in the canebrakes. He would go on to marry one of the newly-arrived Africans, Kanko (Lottie Dennison).
• Redoshi (Sally Smith) gave an interview published in the Montgomery Advertiser. Although she lived in Selma, Redoshi knew Kossola (Cudjo Lewis) well, even into the 1930s. Her account includes details that are consistent with the other accounts, like being transferred between boats at the port of Ouidah, having some time on deck during the voyage, and seeing captain “William” watching for ships in pursuit.

Legal documents (at the National Archives at Atlanta, indexed here):

• The Clotilda’s manifest was certified by Captain William Foster on February 27, 1860, confirming a voyage would begin in a few days’ time.
• On July 18, Mobile customs official Thaddeus Sanford reported “the recent importation of negroes into Alabama” to the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury.
• In two letters both dated July 18, 1860, the U.S. Attorney General instructed three locals –Mobile’s acting district attorney, the Mobile customs official, and the Mobile marshal – to “brin[g] the criminals to justice.” 
• After his investigation, U.S. Marshal Cade M. Godbold swore in an affidavit on July 27, 1860 that more than one hundred African men, women, and children who arrived at the beginning of July were currently being held by John Dabney and Burns Meaher.
• Evidence was sufficient to file charges against Burns Meaher, William Foster, and John Dabney.  Court documents show that on January 10, 1861, presiding judge William Jones, Jr. dismissed the charges. William Jones, Jr. was a close friend of the Meahers – so close, in fact, that Timothy Meaher had named a steamboat after him years before. The next day, Alabama seceded from the Union.
• U.S. district court documents confirm that William Foster failed to report the arrival of the Clotilda to the Mobile customs official or to pay duties on the Clotilda cargo. On August 7, 1860, he was fined $1000 for the offense by the US District Court for the Southern District of Alabama. (USDC Case #2621, U.S. vs. William Foster, 1860)

Oral histories:

Many of the shipmates who survived the Clotilda shared their stories with their children and their children’s children. For example, Mabel Dennison, born in 1921, was the granddaughter of Clotilda survivor Kanko (Lottie) and her husband, James Dennison. Mable grew up knowing details about her grandmother’s capture in Dahomey; about boarding the Clotilda and outrunning British ships; about hiding in the swamps of the Mobile delta, where she met her future husband, James; and more. Mabel knew her family’s stories, and she wrote her grandparents’ biographies.

This story is true, and it is important we recognize it as true.

The Wall Street Journal article misrepresented the nature of available newspaper articles and legal documents. More egregiously, the reporter has dismissed first person accounts and generations of oral histories out of hand. This is not how history is practiced. Such methodology is grossly negligent – and because research regarding enslaved persons depends in part on these sources, this methodology erases the history of 12.5 million Black Americans.

But the real story – the one you should read for yourself – is about the extraordinary lives of about 110 African men, women and children who survived enslavement, preserved African customs, built a remarkable community at Africatown, and learned to thrive as free men and women. Dedicated scholars and reputable publishers have told their stories: Sylviane Diouf, 2007; Natalie Robertson, 2008; Ben Raines, 2022; James Delgado, 2023; Nick Tabor, 2023; and Hannah Durkin, 2024. Their books join myriad documentaries and the History Museum’s exhibition at the Africatown Heritage House in a sophisticated analysis of the evidence, but much more importantly, in sharing the stories of resistance and resilience that are crucial to our world today.

Meg McCrummen Fowler, Ph.D. is the former director of the History Museum of Mobile and was lead curator of “Clotilda: The Exhibition” at Africatown Heritage House in Mobile, Ala. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Fla.