The last survivor of the slave ship Clotilda

Matilda McCrear

Portrait of Matilda McCrear (Image: Newcastle University / Crear Family)

In 1860 the last slave ship landed in the United States. On board was Matilda – a two-year-old girl from West Africa who would later become the last survivor of this final transatlantic slave transport. A historian has now reconstructed her unusual story for the first time. It is the most complete biography of a woman to date who came to North America with the transatlantic slave trade.

Much of the wealth that the British colonies in North America and later the United States generated was gained on the back of slaves. As early as the beginning of the 16th century, plantation owners in particular began to order slaves for field work, but also other lower-level services from Africa. Until the official abolition of slavery in 1865, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children from Africa were abducted and brought to the New World. During this time, more than 40,000 ship passages ensured constant supplies.

The last slave ship

The last slave ship that Africans transported to the United States was the Clotilda, a two-masted schooner that moored in Mobile, Alabama with up to 160 slaves in July 1860. Many of the men, women and children brought to the United States on this ship at that time were still sold and employed as slaves until they had to be released after the U.S. Civil War. Some of the former slaves from the Clotilda founded Africatown north of Mobile – a settlement in which African-born Americans cultivated the culture of their old homeland. For a long time, the spokesman for this community, who died in 1936, Cudjo Kazoola Lewis and the former slave Sally Redoshi Smith, who died in 1937, were considered the last survivors of the Clotilde.

But now historian Hannah Durkin from Newcastle University has uncovered the story of another survivor of this slave ship. Using historical documents, census records, and an old newspaper interview, she reconstructed the life of Matilda McCrear – a woman who was brought to the United States on Clotilda as part of a family with part of her family. Her story is the most complete biography of a woman who came to North America with the transatlantic slave trade and it is the first portrait of the experiences of an entire family in this late period of slavery.

Separated from sisters, sold as a child

As Durkin found out, Matilda, who was then two years old, was brought to the USA on the Clotilda together with her mother Gracie, her three older sisters and her future stepfather. Her two brothers stayed behind in West Africa and Matilda should never know what happened to them. When she arrived in Mobile, Matilde was sold to Walker Creagh together with her ten-year-old sister Sallie and mother, her two other sisters came to another slave owner and were never seen again, as the historian reports.

“In some ways, Matilda was better off than the vast majority of the survivors of this passage because she was able to stay with her mother and sister,” said Durkin. “But her life was still incredibly hard.” Although Matilda was still a young girl when slavery was banned and slaves released, the lives of black people in the southern United States were still not easy after that. “The story of Matilda and her family highlights the horror of slavery, abuse in the southern tenant system, injustices of segregation, and the suffering of black farmers during the Great Depression,” says Durkin.

Resistance even after the era of slavery

Nevertheless, Matilda did not let it get her down, as her life story after the end of slavery shows: Her story is so remarkable because she refused to do what was expected of a black woman in the US at the time, ”says Durkin. “She didn’t get married, instead she had a relationship with a white man originally from Germany, with whom she had 14 children, for decades.” She also wore the traditional hairstyle of African Yoruba for the rest of her life and changed her last name, Creagh, from her former slave owner McCrear around.

“Matilda McCrear committed one of her most amazing acts of resistance when she was in the 70s,” says Durkin. In order to pay compensation for us and other Clotilda survivors, she walked from her house to the court in Selma, about 25 kilometers away, to register her claims and those of Sally Redoshi Smith. But without success: your application was rejected. In 1940, at the age of 81 or 82, Matilda McCrear died as the last survivor of slave transport with the Clotilde. Even her grandson didn’t know that she was one of the involuntary passengers on the ship. “It was a real surprise,” says Johnny Crear.

Source: Newcastle University; Specialist article: Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, doi: 10.1080 / 0144039X.2020.1741833

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