Africatown: The Last Slave Ship To America and The Community It Created

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. Search for The American Stories podcast. Go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On July seventeenth, nineteen thirty-five, a man named Kudjo Lewis died in Mobile, Alabama, at the age of ninety-five. His death would further dwindle the number of remaining survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. He had lived the majority of his life in a small part of Mobile called Africa Town, a community that he and his former shipmates, as they were called, built from scratch. But our story doesn’t start there. It starts at the assignment desk of journalist Nick de Boor, who was asked to track down and do a story on the descendants of those lived in Africa Town. After some searching, he found a man named Gary and gave him a call. Let’s get into the story.

The first thing he said to me on the phone was, “You don’t need to be writing about the descendants. You should be writing about the neighborhood.” He was quite forceful about this. Gary’s comment was, “It used to be this thriving community.” He said, “When I grew up there in the fifties and sixties, there were good jobs. Everybody had big families. There was this thriving business district. It was just a wonderful place to grow up.” He said, “Now it looks like a war zone. Tons of people have left. They built a highway through the neighborhood, wiped out the business district, and it’s surrounded by heavy industry now.” And he said, “I want to know how it got to be that way.” And I felt like it was an important question to investigate. So I went there a day when this law firm was interviewing lots of people at a church about their family histories with cancer pollution emitted by this paper mill that had caused hundreds of cancer cases

in the neighborhood.

I interviewed a whole bunch of people who all had these horrific stories. Everybody I ran into on the street, if I asked them about it, they would say, “My sisters died of cancer in their forties. Both of my parents died of cancer. I survived cancer twice myself.” So when I went back to New York City, I found myself thinking about the neighborhood all the time, and that question that Gary had posed, “How did you get to be this way?” kept recurring to me. I kept thinking, “I wish I could just move down there and piece together all every part of this story.”

“What did they do to it? How did it get to be this way?”

And to ask what’s the link between the slave ship and the pollution, because we know it’s not a coincidence that this community founded by the people who were on the last slave ship ended up being designated sort of this industrial dumping ground for Southern Alabama. Out of all the possible places, it could not have been a coincidence that they chose Africa Town. I thought, “Well, we could say it’s racism, but that wouldn’t really explain anything or reveal anything.” But I thought that if we could understand how it had actually unfolded decade by decade,

then it would reveal a lot.

So maybe six months later, I found myself packing up my apartment in New York and moved down to Alabama. We don’t know very much about Kudjo’s early life. We know that he was from an area called Yoruba Land, an enormous section of West Africa. This might seem anachronistic, but I think in some ways, we could say that it was a pretty democratic society. There’s this paradox where the king was regarded as a god. It was this extremely lofty position. The people could never see the king eating or drinking. Nobody could call the king by his personal name. The king couldn’t visit people’s private homes, and for the most part, couldn’t even be seen in the streets. But at the same time, the king’s authority, to some extent, was symbolic, and there were even carnival days or festival days where people would parade through the streets and voice criticisms of their leaders. The people, for the most part, spoke a common language. There was a pantheon of gods that everybody recognized, if not exactly worshiped. This society did a big business in palm oil in all sorts of European countries. They used it to make soap and candles. We know that he was from a medium-sized town. He started learning to be a warrior at a young age. But the chief of his town always said that people were only being trained in warfare so that they could defend their town, not so that they could make war. To the south of Yoruba Land was a nation called the Kingdom of Dahomey. It was a militarized nation from its inception. It generated its revenue by enslaving people from other parts of West Africa and selling them to European traders. It had access to the coast. It controlled this city called Weeda. Their king as of eighteen fifty-nine, eighteen sixty, was named Gleiley, and in the early years of his reign, he was trafficking in slaves in enormous numbers. Slavery had been practiced in different West African cultures for centuries, but it had different forms. It wasn’t this absolute slavery, this sort of “all bets are off,” you know, “no holds barred” slavery. It wasn’t chattel slavery where the people were regarded as, as sheer property.

Slaves were typically war captives.

But when the Europeans came, offering cash or, more often, goods—things like weapons—they transformed it into this profit-making activity. It was in this context that the Kingdom of Dahomey was created, and King of Dahomey Gleiley demanded that the chief of Cosala’s town start paying him tribute in yams, and he refused to do it, and so a little while later, the Dahomians raided Cosala’s village. The way he describes it is horrific. They came just before the break of dawn, and they carried these enormous knives, these machetes, and they would cut off people’s heads. So when he woke, he would have seen like a field of blood: people screaming, people running, people being grabbed by these Dahomian warriors. So he tried to run away, thought that he had succeeded. He ran past this gate, and then, as soon as he got to the other side, somebody grabbed him. There’s quite a heartbreaking moment in his narration where he says that he wanted to know where his mother was.

He pleaded with

these warriors to let him go find his mother, and they wouldn’t allow him to.

He never saw her again.

He was marched for days, along with others from his town who had been captured, to the city of Weeda. It was there that he encountered William Foster.

And you’re listening to author Nick Tibor tell the story of the last slave ship to America and the community its captives built up. Next, more with Nick Tibor here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the stories we tell about this great country, and especially the stories of America’s rich past, know that all of our stories about American history—from war to innovation, culture, and faith—are brought to us by the great folks at Hillsdale College, a place where students study all the things that are beautiful in life and all the things that are good in life. And if you can’t get to Hillsdale, Hillsdale will come to you with their free and terrific online courses. Go to Hillsdale.edu to learn more. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Kudjo Lewis, the last slave ship to America, in the community its survivors created. Kudjo’s journey across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa would not have been possible, however, without two men in America. One was a ship captain named William Foster, and the other was a particularly brash businessman and shipping magnate named Timothy Mayhair. Let’s get back to the story.

I don’t really believe in the “great men theory of history,” where history is shaped by individual actors who have strong well. But certainly, there are people like Mayhair. He reminds me a lot of Thomas Sutpen…

in Absolom, Absolom, this force of nature.

He supposedly had a quote, unquote difficulty with the clerk of one of his ships, and he was stabbed or cut by this guy’s knife. The paper reported that it’s their understanding that it was Mayhair’s fault. And in another case, he was accused of, of ramming one of his ships into another vessel, apparently out of spite for the other captain.

This newspaper, they…

said, “It’s hard to believe that a captain would have done something like that just out of pettiness, just because he hated this other captain. But if by some chance it’s true, then this guy should be scourged from the river.” Timothy Mayhair came from an Irish Catholic

family in Maine.

He came down to Mobile sometime around eighteen thirty-five. The Deep South was still sort of a frontier in that period, and he started working jobs on the river.

He started as a…

deckhand on a ship and worked one job after another, kind of working his way up the ranks and ultimately became a ship captain. And as he was doing that, he was able to save a lot of money and go into business for himself. He built a lumberyard and a shingle factory, and he had a plantation and his own shipyard. The first ship that Mayhair had built for himself was called the Orlean Saint John. We think that he named it that after a young woman that he was trying to wo. This ship was extremely fancy. It had thirty-eight cabins, had a saloon, had this expensive carpet and furniture, and it reminds me of the Titanic. It was this much-publicized affair, and its made-in voyage… The ship was sailing to Montgomery, and Mayhair had a timeline. He was trying to get to Montgomery within five days because some of his passengers wanted to catch a train there, but the wind was blowing against him, so he, sort of late in the voyage, to make up for lost time, had the boat stocked with firewood so the crew could stuff the furnace and create more steam to power the ship. Sparks from the furnace ignited the stack of logs, and the whole boat went up in flames. Everybody had to jump into the cold, muddy water, and the newspapers reported that between the people who were burned in the ship and the people who drowned in the river, the death toll reached about forty. Mayhair was praised as a hero for trying to save passengers, and maybe he did, even though he created the conditions for this to happen. But in the end, he received sixteen thousand dollars in insurance money, and he apparently used that money to open his shipyard. And there’s always been a rumor that one of the people on board was a Navy officer who was carrying like a quarter million dollars worth of gold, and the gold was never recovered, and the rumor was always that Tim Mayhair had brought divers from the Caribbean to go fish the gold out of the silts in the river bottom, and that this gold became the basis for his business empire. That’s just a bit of Mobile war. He was also fairly active in politics. He never ran for office, but he did help to support the project of this guy named William Walker, who was trying to create a new colony in Nicaragua. Mayhair and other Southern businessmen wanted to expand slavery down into Latin America, and they wanted Nicaragua to be the first outpost for this. And they imagined that Mobile could be the center of this new Southern empire that would span the continents, a Southern Republic. In fact, Mayhair had a ship that he called the Southern Republic. Cotton was this extraordinarily valuable commodity. It was similar to what petroleum is in the world economy now, and they depended on enslaved people. It had been illegal since eighteen oh eight to import slaves from West Africa into the U.S. If you wanted slaves, then you had to get them from within the United States.

But it still wasn’t enough. There was still this sort of this labor…

crunch in Alabama and Mobile. We have reports from some of the travelogs of the eighteen-fifties of hotels resorting to hiring Irish people as servants because they couldn’t get enough slaves. So there was a push among Southern businessmen in the eighteen-fifties to reopen the Transatlantic slave trade. It was degrading to the South, and there was also a convention in the spring of eighteen fifty-nine when these businessmen from all over the South gathered in Vicksburg, and by a vast majority, they approved this resolution calling for the repeal of all restrictions on the slave trade.

So Mayhair was at the center of all that.

And the way that he told the story is that in eighteen fifty-nine, one night he was on a boat that was headed up the Mobile River, headed toward Montgomery, and he had some passengers from the North on board, and they were talking about how James Buchanan’s administration had been claiming that it was going to start cracking down on these illegal slave voyages, and Mayhair supposedly said, “I don’t believe it.”

“I’m going to call their blood.”

“I don’t think that there’s any way they would actually execute anybody for bringing an illegal slave ship over.” And he supposedly said, “I’m going to prove it by doing it myself.” And it seems like this was probably both a money-making venture for him—he planned to sell these captives and make a profit—but also an active political protest to call the bluff of the Buchanan administration and show that you could still get away with doing this, and that the will to stamp it out really wasn’t there. Later on, the lower became that this was not just a boast that Mayhair made, but that it was a bat. I think in one case, it was reported to be something like ten thousand dollars, which would have been an insane amount of money back in eighteen fifty-nine. So as for the Clotelda itself, people didn’t want to go on slave voyages. Sailors didn’t want to go on them. It was not a desirable line of work. These voyages were horrible.

They were dangerous.

Apart from the fact that you were sailing across all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, and that was always dangerous, there could be shipwrecks. A couple of times, the Clotelda almost experienced a shipwreck itself. There was also the possibility of slave revolts, and the work was just unimaginably filthy. You were dealing with hundreds of captives who had to lie in their own waist, and the mortality rate among captives on slave ships was extremely high. People were always dying from the horrific conditions and having me thrown overboard. The pay was often pretty poor, and so it became a common thing during the height of the slave trade to get sailors drunk in gambling houses, in a lot of cases, to get them blackout drunk and then tell them, “You have amassed so much gambling debt. The only way you can possibly pay it back is by going on this slave voyage.”

We don’t know much about how…

the crew of the Clotelda were recruited, but there was this episode in eighteen fifty-nine when the Clotelda was sailing back to Mobile from Texas. The ship was moving fast, and there was a skiff in the water, this small boat with two men on it, and when the Clotelda got close, ended up going across this chain that was connecting the small boat, sort of anchoring it to a log in the river, and the little boat flipped over, and the Clotelda ended up running over one of the men who had been on the skiff, a Black man named Alfred, and he was an enslaved person. Alfred’s owner ended up suing, and Bill Foster was ordered to pay fifteen hundred dollars. It’s pretty clear from the records that he didn’t really own anything besides the Clotelda. And so it seems likely that this was about the time that Timothy Mayhair would have approached him about sailing to Dahomey and fetching this cargo of slaves. Mayhair offered to pay him a cut of the proceeds, about half a dozen slaves, which would have been worth thousands of dowares in the market. So Foster agreed to do it. They re-rigged the Clotelda, loaded it with barrels of water, barrels of beef and pork. They stocked it with a bunch of gold, and they put lumber on top of the gold, in case…

the ship were searched.

We have one source that says that when they set out, their papers said that purpose of the voyage was to haul lumber to Saint Thomas in the Danish Virgin Islands. But Foster, of course, knew that he was actually headed for West Africa.

And what a story you’re hearing right now! And my goodness, Timothy Mayhair, well, he is slavery personified

in the South.

A very few people benefited from slavery directly, and it was generally large plantation owners and traders like this, slave traders themselves, and people in the shipping business. Timothy Mayhair was one such person, and he challenged the slave trade prohibitions directly, not just as an act of political protest, but for profit. When we return, more of the story of Africa Town on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the final portion of the story of Kudjo Lewis, the last slave ship to America, and the community its survivors created. We return back to the story of Kudjo Lewis, captured and held in the city of Weeda.

He and the other captives were held in these structures called barracoons. They sort of looked like sheds, and they sort of looked like cages, bamboo poles lashed together, and he describes the scene where he and t