On This Day In Alabama History: The Last Recorded Slave Ship Arrived Illegally In Mobile

Alabama News Center | July 8, 2017 @ 5:00 am

By Graydon Rust
Alabama 200

July 8, 1860

The schooner Clotilda, the last recorded slave ship to bring African slaves to the United States, arrived illegally in Mobile. Though the U.S. had abolished the international slave trade 52 years earlier, the ship brought 110 men, women and children from present-day Benin to Alabama. The majority of the slaves were kept in Mobile, with 25 sold upriver. Following the Civil War, most of the formerly enslaved wished to return to Africa, but lacked the required funds. Instead, they founded the community of Africatown (also called African Town) in Mobile County as the first town in the country founded, controlled and continuously occupied by blacks.

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