Clotilde (slave Ship) - Historiography

Historiography

In the early 1900s, however, tales of slaving and slave ships became popular in the pulp press. About this time a story appeared about the Clotilda appeared in Harper's Monthly Magazine (CXIII, 1906), by a S. H. M. Byers. According to the story, Timothy Meagher, a plantation owner, bet some of his friends that he could bring a ship full of Africans into Mobile Bay, Alabama. In the summer of 1860, the story continued, Meagher succeeded: 110 slaves reached shore. Subsequently, the story concluded, Meagher was arrested and charged.

Despite the richness of Byer's story, its veracity is in dispute. In American Slavers and the Federal Law, 1837–1862 (Berkeley: U. of Ca. Press, 1963, P. 302) Professor Warren S. Howard noted that "the rumored landing of the Clotilda in Mobile Bay in July 1860 has been accepted by several historians as true, but no good evidence of it has ever been found. Moreover, three authors give three different versions of the affair, and not one offers a sound source for his assertions." As for the particular Harper's Monthly article, says Howard, "Byers, though claiming to have obtained his information from some of the Africans who were landed, gives numerous details about the business side of the voyage which must have been unknown to them; furthermore, he cites no authority for these details."

Whether the Clotilda story is true, and to what extent it is based on any real occurrence, may never be known. That is why the Wanderer is still considered the last documented slave ship to reach America. As historian David M. Potter noted in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history, The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861, (NY: Harper Perennial, 1977, P. 397), "Apparently everyone in the South in the late 1850s knew someoone who knew someone else who had seen a coffle of slaves direct from Africa. But no one who had seen them has left any testimony. One ship, the Wanderer, did bring a cargo of slaves from Africa in 1858, and this bizarre event was apparently reenacted many times in the imagination."