The Last Slave Ship

At low tide the hull of the Clotilde can be seen a little even now, in the marsh of Bayou Corne, in Alabama, where she was scuttled and sunk. She was the last ship to bring a cargo of “black ivory” to the United States—stealing into Mobile Bay on a sultry night in August, 1859, only two years before Abraham Lincoln was elected and only five years before Emancipation. The progeny of those last-minute slaves today still live in Alabama, mostly in the untidy clapboard village of Plateau, long also known as African Town.