July 8, 2024 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, the recently enslaved people on the last, law-defying slave ship to arrive in America would build their own town, and give many freed black Americans a gift beyond measure: freedom. Here to tell the story is Nick Tabor, author of Africatown.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
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,
(00:33):
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
(00:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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
(01:38):
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
(02:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
In the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
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
(02:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
What did they do to it? How did it get
to be this way?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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
(03:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Then it would reveal a lot.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
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 Kadjo's early life. We
know that he was from an area called Yoruba Land,
an enormous section of West Africa. This might seem anachronistic,
(03:44):
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.
(04:05):
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
(04:27):
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.
(04:52):
To the south of Yuroba 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
(05:15):
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
(05:35):
holds barred slavery. It wasn't chattel slavery where the people
were regarded as as sheer property.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Slaves were typically war captives.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
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
(06:05):
a little while later the Dahomians rated Cosalas 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
(06:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
He pleaded with.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
These warriors to let him go find his mother, and
they wouldn't allow him to.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
He never saw her again.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
He was marched for days, along with others from his
town who had been captured, to the city of Weida.
It was there that he encountered William Foster.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:51):
will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we
continue with our American stories and the story of Kudjo Lewis,
(08:14):
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
(08:34):
Timothy Mayhair. Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
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 Mayor. He
reminds me a lot of Thomas suttpen.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
In Absolom, Absalom, this force of nature.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
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 Mayor'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.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
This newspaper, they.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
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 Mayer came from an Irish Catholic.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Family in Maine.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
He started as a.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
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 lumber yard
and a shingle factory, and he had a plantation and
his own shipyard. The first ship that Mayor had built
(10:09):
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 it's made in voyage.
The ship was sailing to Montgomery and Mayor had a timeline.
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
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 Mayer was praised as a hero
for trying to save passengers, and maybe he did, even
(11:16):
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
(11:37):
gold was never recovered, and the rumor was always that
Tim Mayer 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
(12:00):
he did help to support the project of this guy
named William Walker, who was trying to create a new
colony in Nicaragua. Mayor 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
(12:20):
empire that would span the continents, a Southern Republic. In fact,
Mayor 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
(12:44):
o eight to import slaves from West Africa into the US.
If you wanted slaves, then you had to get them
from within the United States.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
But it still wasn't enough. There was still this sort
of this labor.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
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.
(13:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So Mayor was at the center of all that.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
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 Mayor supposedly said, I
(13:58):
don't believe it.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
I'm going to call their blood.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
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
(14:22):
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 may Or 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.
(14:44):
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 in These
voyages were horrible.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
They were dangerous.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
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 Clotilda
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
(15:19):
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
(15:39):
them you have amassed so much gambling debt the only
way you can possibly pay it back is by going
on this slave voyage.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
We don't know much about how.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
The crew of the Clotilda were recruited, but there was
this episode in eighteen fifty nine when the Clotilda 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 Clotilda
got close, ended up going across this chain that was
(16:10):
connecting the small boat, sort of anchoring it to a
log in the river, and the little boat flipped over
and the Clotilda 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
(16:30):
he didn't really own anything besides the Clotilda. And so
it seems likely that this was about the time that
Timothy Mayor would have approached him about sailing to Dahomie
and fetching this cargo of slaves. Mayer 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 Clotilda,
(16:53):
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 case.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
The ship were searched.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And what a story you're hearing right now. And my goodness,
Timothy Mayer, well, he is slavery personified.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
In the South.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
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 Mayor
was one such person, and he challenged the slave trade
prohibitions directly, not just as an act of political protest,
(17:44):
but for profit. When we return more of the story
of Africa Town on our American story, and we continue
(18:09):
with our American stories and the final portion of the
story of Cudjo Lewis, the last slave ship to America
and the community its survivors created, we returned back to
the story of Kudjo Lewis captured and held in the
city of Weeda.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
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 the other captives
were ordered to stand in circles of about ten each.
They were divided by gender, and this white person started
making his way through and in each case he would
(18:47):
stand in the center of the circle and go around
and look at the captives and he would sort of
stare them down, inspect their bodies, pried into their mouths,
looked at their teeth, and if there was somebody that
he wanted, he would single them out and those people
would be led off.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Ultimately, he chose well over one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
The captives were offered a final meal led to this
lagoon that separated Weeda from the ocean. He would have
been taking across on a canoe and brought into the
hold of the Clotilda.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
For something like two weeks.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
The captives were kept in the hold. Foster wanted to
keep them out of sight in case they passed other
ships that would have seen them and potentially found that
they were making this illegal voyage. After two weeks, he
decided that the ghost was clear and he started bringing
them up on deck sort of in shifts. They would
be rotated through, and the first time they were brought up,
their muscles were so atrophied that they couldn't stand up
(19:41):
or walk, and the sailors had to support them. Maybe one,
maybe three, I've heard it speculated that as many as
seven people died. Kadjo always said afterward that it had
been a seventy day journey, but the best evidence we
have suggested it took about forty five days. Abraham Lincoln
imposed a blockade on all the Confederate poor right at
the beginning of the war, in the spring of eighteen
(20:02):
sixty one and stationed a ship at Mobile Bay, so
prices of food shot way up. There are reports of
a bread riot on the plantation. Food wasn't short supply
for Kadjo and the other shipmates. They didn't have any coffee,
so they would parch rice and drink the water. And
in the spring of eighteen sixty five, thousands of Union
soldiers marched in the city, and Kajo tells this story
(20:25):
about being on one of the mayor's ships. But Jim Mayer,
who was going to captain the voyage who they were
waiting for, he hadn't shown up. Kajo thought this was odd,
and he saw some Union soldiers picking berries from mulberry trees.
And the soldiers saw him and the other enslaved men
there and said, oh, you guys are free, like you
don't belong to anyone anymore. And they didn't really understand
(20:46):
what does that mean for us?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Then where are we going?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
And they said, go wherever you feel like going. You're
not slaves anymore. So some of the other shipmates who
were farther up in Mobile County, who were on the
plantation of Burns Mayor who was I Tim and Jim.
These people came down to celebrate with the other shipmates,
and they said that they made a drum and they
played it like they would have done back in West Africa.
(21:11):
The lower in Africa Town has always been that the
shipmates knew more about being free than they did about
being slaves because they had been free for their whole lives.
And the lower in the neighborhood is that the shipmates
had to teach emancipated people who had grown up in
America how to be free. So they taught the American
born people how to hunt, how to fish, how to
(21:33):
live as independent people. What they wanted most of all
was to go back home. There's even an account of
them saving their money, pooling their money. Some of them
were working at a sawmill that belonged to Timothy Mayor,
and they saved their wages and put them together. Approached
Bill Foster and asked him if they could pay him
to take them back to their homes, and Foster said,
(21:56):
the amount of money you have here is not nearly enough.
There's no way you're going to be able to save
up enough money to pay me for that. So that
plan fell apart, and they decided that their best option
was to create a home for themselves in Alabama. They
started pooling their money to buy property. They asked Timothy
may Or if he would give them some land. They
(22:17):
felt like it was the least he could do, but
he became furious when Kujo asked him. He said he
had taken good care of them during the years that
they were working on his plantation and he didn't owe
them anything more. They ended up buying property from him
at full price, and they created this settlement that became
known as African Town.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
They appointed this man named Gumpa to be their chief.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
He was actually from Dahomi, the country that enslaved them originally,
but after he had endured captivity with them, he'd experienced
the Middle Passage with them.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
He'd been a slave along with them.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
They felt like there was no difference between GROUPA and
them leader, and they also appointed two others to be
their judges. But Kujo did become the sexton of Union
Baptist Church, which was the church that the shipmates founded.
They didn't feel as if they had abandoned their religion
that they grew up with. They felt like they had
always worshiped God, but in America, they learned more about
(23:19):
God through Christianity. Kujo said to one person, we always
knew about God, but we didn't know that God had
a son. That was one thing that they did love
about being here. One of Kudjo's grandsons had this memory
of reading to him from the Psalms, and he said
there were moments when there would be a word that
he couldn't pronounce, so he would skip over it. And
Kudjo knew the Psalms so well that he would always
(23:41):
notice when his grandson did this.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
He would say, you're skipping something. There.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
There was such a deep feeling of community. We estimate
that the population was around fifteen thousand at one time.
A lot of these families were huge. It wasn't uncommon
for a family to have eight or ten kids. They
were fairly poor, and most of the roads were unpaved,
but the community was rich. I think that to understand
what happened there, you have to go back to reconstruction.
(24:11):
One of my favorite Americans, I have to say, Steadia Stevens,
one of the radical Republican legislators. He gave this speech
where he said, if we're really serious about bringing the
South to heal and doing right by the enslaved people.
What we ought to do is break up the plantations
and give it all to the emancipated people. We would
both break up the power of the Southern aristocracy and
(24:34):
we would create this broad class of black independent farmers.
Of course, this didn't happen. Instead, the Mayor family ended
up holding on to most of this land that surrounded
Africa Town, and in the nineteen twenties, the grandson of
Timothy Mayor leased a bunch of this property to a
northern paper conglomerate, and this enormous paperment was built on
(24:56):
the edge of the community. Another factor here is that
in tino Ie, Alabama established a new constitution which stripped
black people of their voting rights. So the shipmates and
their descendants had very little money, very little land, and
no political voice, and so they had no way of
making decisions about whether heavy industry would be cited near
(25:18):
their homes or not. I think the story of Africa
Town gives us a rare opportunity to see how.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
The mechanics of racism actually work.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I also think that the legacy of Africa Town is
a legacy of self determination and defiance. They never passively
endured the hardships that were inflicted on them. When they
were freed after the war, they took it upon themselves
to buy property and carve out their own little civilization
in Alabama, their own little republic. There's this anecdote about
(25:49):
Kudjo being hit by a train when he was middle
aged to elderly, and he actually sued the railroad company
and won in court. I think that's another example of
the defiance this community, and it continues to the present
day where residents have kept the stories alive for generations,
even for decades when people said that this story of
(26:10):
the Clotilda was just a hoax, and at long last,
the world has taken notice and recognized that the stories
were always true and that this is one of the
great overlooked stories of American history.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
author Nick Tabor and his book is Africa Town, the
last slave ship to America. In the community it's captives built,
And my goodness, I love that line where he said
the shipmates knew more about being free than being a
(26:44):
slave because they had just gotten here, and they were
never slaves back in Africa. What they really wanted was
to go back home. The option was too expensive, so
they decided to pool their money and build homes, a town,
a settle all their own. Fifteen thousand strong, big families,
(27:06):
strong culture, poor in money, rich in spirit, and so
many other ways. The story of Africa Town here on
our American Stories
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,
(00:33):
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
(00:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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
(01:38):
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
(02:00):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
In the neighborhood.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
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
(02:35):
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.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
What did they do to it? How did it get
to be this way?
Speaker 2 (02:49):
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
(03:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Then it would reveal a lot.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
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 Kadjo's early life. We
know that he was from an area called Yoruba Land,
an enormous section of West Africa. This might seem anachronistic,
(03:44):
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.
(04:05):
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
(04:27):
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.
(04:52):
To the south of Yuroba 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
(05:15):
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
(05:35):
holds barred slavery. It wasn't chattel slavery where the people
were regarded as as sheer property.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
Slaves were typically war captives.
Speaker 2 (05:43):
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
(06:05):
a little while later the Dahomians rated Cosalas 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
(06:26):
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.
Speaker 3 (06:44):
He pleaded with.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
These warriors to let him go find his mother, and
they wouldn't allow him to.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
He never saw her again.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
He was marched for days, along with others from his
town who had been captured, to the city of Weida.
It was there that he encountered William Foster.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
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
(07:31):
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
(07:51):
will come to you with their free and terrific online courses.
Go to Hillsdale dot edu to learn more. And we
continue with our American stories and the story of Kudjo Lewis,
(08:14):
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
(08:34):
Timothy Mayhair. Let's get back to the story.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
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 Mayor. He
reminds me a lot of Thomas suttpen.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
In Absolom, Absalom, this force of nature.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
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 Mayor'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.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
This newspaper, they.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
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 Mayer came from an Irish Catholic.
Speaker 3 (09:35):
Family in Maine.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
He started as a.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
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 lumber yard
and a shingle factory, and he had a plantation and
his own shipyard. The first ship that Mayor had built
(10:09):
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 it's made in voyage.
The ship was sailing to Montgomery and Mayor had a timeline.
(10:31):
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
(10:53):
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 Mayer was praised as a hero
for trying to save passengers, and maybe he did, even
(11:16):
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
(11:37):
gold was never recovered, and the rumor was always that
Tim Mayer 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
(12:00):
he did help to support the project of this guy
named William Walker, who was trying to create a new
colony in Nicaragua. Mayor 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
(12:20):
empire that would span the continents, a Southern Republic. In fact,
Mayor 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
(12:44):
o eight to import slaves from West Africa into the US.
If you wanted slaves, then you had to get them
from within the United States.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
But it still wasn't enough. There was still this sort
of this labor.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
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.
(13:17):
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.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
So Mayor was at the center of all that.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
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 Mayor supposedly said, I
(13:58):
don't believe it.
Speaker 3 (13:59):
I'm going to call their blood.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
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
(14:22):
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 may Or 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.
(14:44):
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 in These
voyages were horrible.
Speaker 3 (14:54):
They were dangerous.
Speaker 2 (14:56):
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 Clotilda
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
(15:19):
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
(15:39):
them you have amassed so much gambling debt the only
way you can possibly pay it back is by going
on this slave voyage.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
We don't know much about how.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
The crew of the Clotilda were recruited, but there was
this episode in eighteen fifty nine when the Clotilda 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 Clotilda
got close, ended up going across this chain that was
(16:10):
connecting the small boat, sort of anchoring it to a
log in the river, and the little boat flipped over
and the Clotilda 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
(16:30):
he didn't really own anything besides the Clotilda. And so
it seems likely that this was about the time that
Timothy Mayor would have approached him about sailing to Dahomie
and fetching this cargo of slaves. Mayer 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 Clotilda,
(16:53):
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 case.
Speaker 3 (17:00):
The ship were searched.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
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.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
And what a story you're hearing right now. And my goodness,
Timothy Mayer, well, he is slavery personified.
Speaker 3 (17:23):
In the South.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
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 Mayor
was one such person, and he challenged the slave trade
prohibitions directly, not just as an act of political protest,
(17:44):
but for profit. When we return more of the story
of Africa Town on our American story, and we continue
(18:09):
with our American stories and the final portion of the
story of Cudjo Lewis, the last slave ship to America
and the community its survivors created, we returned back to
the story of Kudjo Lewis captured and held in the
city of Weeda.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
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 the other captives
were ordered to stand in circles of about ten each.
They were divided by gender, and this white person started
making his way through and in each case he would
(18:47):
stand in the center of the circle and go around
and look at the captives and he would sort of
stare them down, inspect their bodies, pried into their mouths,
looked at their teeth, and if there was somebody that
he wanted, he would single them out and those people
would be led off.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Ultimately, he chose well over one hundred people.
Speaker 2 (19:04):
The captives were offered a final meal led to this
lagoon that separated Weeda from the ocean. He would have
been taking across on a canoe and brought into the
hold of the Clotilda.
Speaker 3 (19:20):
For something like two weeks.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
The captives were kept in the hold. Foster wanted to
keep them out of sight in case they passed other
ships that would have seen them and potentially found that
they were making this illegal voyage. After two weeks, he
decided that the ghost was clear and he started bringing
them up on deck sort of in shifts. They would
be rotated through, and the first time they were brought up,
their muscles were so atrophied that they couldn't stand up
(19:41):
or walk, and the sailors had to support them. Maybe one,
maybe three, I've heard it speculated that as many as
seven people died. Kadjo always said afterward that it had
been a seventy day journey, but the best evidence we
have suggested it took about forty five days. Abraham Lincoln
imposed a blockade on all the Confederate poor right at
the beginning of the war, in the spring of eighteen
(20:02):
sixty one and stationed a ship at Mobile Bay, so
prices of food shot way up. There are reports of
a bread riot on the plantation. Food wasn't short supply
for Kadjo and the other shipmates. They didn't have any coffee,
so they would parch rice and drink the water. And
in the spring of eighteen sixty five, thousands of Union
soldiers marched in the city, and Kajo tells this story
(20:25):
about being on one of the mayor's ships. But Jim Mayer,
who was going to captain the voyage who they were
waiting for, he hadn't shown up. Kajo thought this was odd,
and he saw some Union soldiers picking berries from mulberry trees.
And the soldiers saw him and the other enslaved men
there and said, oh, you guys are free, like you
don't belong to anyone anymore. And they didn't really understand
(20:46):
what does that mean for us?
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Then where are we going?
Speaker 2 (20:49):
And they said, go wherever you feel like going. You're
not slaves anymore. So some of the other shipmates who
were farther up in Mobile County, who were on the
plantation of Burns Mayor who was I Tim and Jim.
These people came down to celebrate with the other shipmates,
and they said that they made a drum and they
played it like they would have done back in West Africa.
(21:11):
The lower in Africa Town has always been that the
shipmates knew more about being free than they did about
being slaves because they had been free for their whole lives.
And the lower in the neighborhood is that the shipmates
had to teach emancipated people who had grown up in
America how to be free. So they taught the American
born people how to hunt, how to fish, how to
(21:33):
live as independent people. What they wanted most of all
was to go back home. There's even an account of
them saving their money, pooling their money. Some of them
were working at a sawmill that belonged to Timothy Mayor,
and they saved their wages and put them together. Approached
Bill Foster and asked him if they could pay him
to take them back to their homes, and Foster said,
(21:56):
the amount of money you have here is not nearly enough.
There's no way you're going to be able to save
up enough money to pay me for that. So that
plan fell apart, and they decided that their best option
was to create a home for themselves in Alabama. They
started pooling their money to buy property. They asked Timothy
may Or if he would give them some land. They
(22:17):
felt like it was the least he could do, but
he became furious when Kujo asked him. He said he
had taken good care of them during the years that
they were working on his plantation and he didn't owe
them anything more. They ended up buying property from him
at full price, and they created this settlement that became
known as African Town.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
They appointed this man named Gumpa to be their chief.
Speaker 2 (22:45):
He was actually from Dahomi, the country that enslaved them originally,
but after he had endured captivity with them, he'd experienced
the Middle Passage with them.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
He'd been a slave along with them.
Speaker 2 (22:56):
They felt like there was no difference between GROUPA and
them leader, and they also appointed two others to be
their judges. But Kujo did become the sexton of Union
Baptist Church, which was the church that the shipmates founded.
They didn't feel as if they had abandoned their religion
that they grew up with. They felt like they had
always worshiped God, but in America, they learned more about
(23:19):
God through Christianity. Kujo said to one person, we always
knew about God, but we didn't know that God had
a son. That was one thing that they did love
about being here. One of Kudjo's grandsons had this memory
of reading to him from the Psalms, and he said
there were moments when there would be a word that
he couldn't pronounce, so he would skip over it. And
Kudjo knew the Psalms so well that he would always
(23:41):
notice when his grandson did this.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
He would say, you're skipping something. There.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
There was such a deep feeling of community. We estimate
that the population was around fifteen thousand at one time.
A lot of these families were huge. It wasn't uncommon
for a family to have eight or ten kids. They
were fairly poor, and most of the roads were unpaved,
but the community was rich. I think that to understand
what happened there, you have to go back to reconstruction.
(24:11):
One of my favorite Americans, I have to say, Steadia Stevens,
one of the radical Republican legislators. He gave this speech
where he said, if we're really serious about bringing the
South to heal and doing right by the enslaved people.
What we ought to do is break up the plantations
and give it all to the emancipated people. We would
both break up the power of the Southern aristocracy and
(24:34):
we would create this broad class of black independent farmers.
Of course, this didn't happen. Instead, the Mayor family ended
up holding on to most of this land that surrounded
Africa Town, and in the nineteen twenties, the grandson of
Timothy Mayor leased a bunch of this property to a
northern paper conglomerate, and this enormous paperment was built on
(24:56):
the edge of the community. Another factor here is that
in tino Ie, Alabama established a new constitution which stripped
black people of their voting rights. So the shipmates and
their descendants had very little money, very little land, and
no political voice, and so they had no way of
making decisions about whether heavy industry would be cited near
(25:18):
their homes or not. I think the story of Africa
Town gives us a rare opportunity to see how.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
The mechanics of racism actually work.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
I also think that the legacy of Africa Town is
a legacy of self determination and defiance. They never passively
endured the hardships that were inflicted on them. When they
were freed after the war, they took it upon themselves
to buy property and carve out their own little civilization
in Alabama, their own little republic. There's this anecdote about
(25:49):
Kudjo being hit by a train when he was middle
aged to elderly, and he actually sued the railroad company
and won in court. I think that's another example of
the defiance this community, and it continues to the present
day where residents have kept the stories alive for generations,
even for decades when people said that this story of
(26:10):
the Clotilda was just a hoax, and at long last,
the world has taken notice and recognized that the stories
were always true and that this is one of the
great overlooked stories of American history.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
And a terrific job on the editing, production, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to
author Nick Tabor and his book is Africa Town, the
last slave ship to America. In the community it's captives built,
And my goodness, I love that line where he said
the shipmates knew more about being free than being a
(26:44):
slave because they had just gotten here, and they were
never slaves back in Africa. What they really wanted was
to go back home. The option was too expensive, so
they decided to pool their money and build homes, a town,
a settle all their own. Fifteen thousand strong, big families,
(27:06):
strong culture, poor in money, rich in spirit, and so
many other ways. The story of Africa Town here on
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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