Remembering Matilda, The Last Survivor Of The Clotilda

By George Charles Darley, Aljazeera

On a cold December morning in 1931, a short, elderly Black woman set out on a 24km (15-mile) walk from her homestead in Alabama, United States, on a quest for justice. The long trek to the court in Selma was no small undertaking for a person in her mid-70s. But Matilda McCrear was determined to go and make her legal claim for compensation for the horrors that she and her family had been through.

Until her death 85 years ago on January 13, 1940, Matilda was the last surviving passenger on the last-ever slave ship bound from the West African coast to North America in late 1859.

Her story began many decades before and thousands of miles away from that sharecropping homestead. Originally named Abake – “born to be loved by all” – the girl later renamed Matilda by her American “owner” came into the world circa 1857, among the Tarkar people of the West African interior.

In 1859, at the age of two, little Abake was captured along with her mother (later renamed Grace), her three older sisters and some other relatives, by troops of the Kingdom of Dahomey, located in what is now Benin. Torn away from the rest of their family, they were victims of an age-old regional warfare which underpinned an equally ancient but persistent trade in slavery reaching across North and East Africa, the Ottoman Empire and eventually the Americas.

The precise details of her capture are unknown but, like millions before them, Abake and the other captives were very likely tied together in groups, with ropes and wooden yokes, and forced to march hundreds of miles to the coastal port of Ouidah, now a city in southern Benin. Their so-called “death march” was the first leg of a long and merciless sojourn.

Once they arrived in Ouidah, slaves would be held in “barracoons” – enclosed pens within which prisoners awaited inspection and sale to European traders, at which point they were often branded with the dehumanising mark of their new owner.

Abake and her family members were sold as part of a consignment of slaves to one Captain William Foster, of Canadian origin. He wrote in his journal: “I went to see the King of Dahomey. Having agreeably transacted [our] affairs … we went to the warehouse where they had in confinement four thousand captives in a state of nudity from which they gave me liberty to select one hundred and twenty-five as mine, offering to brand them for me, from which I preemptorily forbid [sic]; commenced taking on cargo of negroes, successfully securing on board one hundred and ten.”

Foster’s ship, Clotilda – a two-masted schooner, 26 metres (86 feet) in length – is now infamous as the last ship known to have carried slaves across the Atlantic to North America. By this time it was an illegal journey, for while slavery continued across the southeast of the US (and in parts of South America), the importation of slaves had been prohibited since 1808. The Clotilda set sail from Ouidah late in the year, purportedly carrying lumber – the 11-man crew being promised double their normal wage to keep quiet about the true contents, as per an entry in Foster’s journal.

Their route across the Atlantic was known as the “Middle Passage”, making up the second part of a triangular trade route connecting Europe, Africa and the Americas. Ships carried weapons and manufactured goods from Europe to the “slave coast” of West Africa on the first part of the round trip; in the Middle Passage, that cargo was traded for enslaved Africans who were transported to the US and South America, where they were usually sold by auction; and on the final course, the vessels returned to Europe usually laden with cotton, tobacco and sugarcane.

The Middle Passage was a horrific journey lasting some 80 days, during which the human cargo endured cramped and filthy conditions. In the autobiography of an 18th-century slave, Olaudah Equiano, one slaving ship is described as being “so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocating us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died.”

Separated and sold – a brutal but common fate

Of the approximately 12.5 million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas over some 350 years, it is estimated that at least two million souls perished during the crossing over the Atlantic. Grace would later tell her daughters how she had witnessed her nephew and others from her Tarkar village being simply thrown overboard when they became unwell, apparently to prevent any contagion.

Foster navigated the Clotilda, now carrying 108 slaves, into the port of Mobile, Alabama under cover of darkness in early 1860. He had it towed up the Mobile River to Twelvemile Island, where the captive Africans were transferred to a river steamboat. Foster wrote in his journal that the Clotilda was then burned to destroy any evidence.

Foster was ultimately prosecuted in 1861 for illegal slave importation, but the case was dismissed for lack of evidence from the ship or its manifest. It was not until 2019 that researchers found the remains of the Clotilda in the Mobile River, confirming its existence and location.

At Twelvemile Island, Abake, her mother and her 10-year-old sister were handed over by Foster to one of the financial backers of Clotilda, a wealthy plantation owner by the name of Memorable Creagh.

In another heartbreaking separation, Abake’s two other sisters (whose names are unknown) were sent elsewhere, never to be seen again – a typically brutal fate for so many of those regarded as a mere commodity.

Abake, her mother, and her sister soon found themselves on Creagh’s plantation near Montgomery, Alabama. There, Abake was given the new forename Matilda, her mother was renamed Grace, and her sister as Sally. Grace was forcibly married to a fellow survivor of the Clotilda, who had been renamed Guy.

Waiting all her life for justice that never came

In 1931, Matilda heard a rumour that people like her were receiving compensation for being illegally smuggled as slaves into the US. That was when she decided to embark upon the 15-mile journey on foot to the Selma court in Alabama to make her claim.

The judge declared the rumour to be “false” and dismissed her case. But fortunately for modern historians, an account of her lawsuit was published by the Selma Times-Journal. This was the article discovered by Hannah Durkin, a Newcastle University historian specialising in the transatlantic slave trade and author of the 2024 book, Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

The Selma Times-Journal news story provides a vivid description of Matilda: “She walks with a vigorous stride. Her kinky hair is almost white and is plaited in small tufts and with bright-coloured string … Her voice is low and husky, but clear. Age shows most in her eyes … yet her … skin is firm and smooth.”

The article went on to relate that “Tildy has vigor and spirit in spite of her years … endurance and a natural aptitude for agriculture inherited from the Tarkar tribe, made [her] a thrifty farmer.”

Durkin writes that Matilda’s story is particularly remarkable “because she resisted what was expected of a Black woman in the US South in the years after emancipation. She did not get married. Instead, she had a decades-long common-law marriage … Even though she left West Africa when she was a toddler, she appears throughout her life to have worn her hair in a traditional Yoruba style, a style presumably taught to her by her mother.”

Matilda fell ill after a stroke and died at the age of 83 on January 13, 1940.

One participant at Matilda’s funeral was her little grandson, John Crear. “I was about three years old and I got away from my parents and almost fell in the grave,” he told National Geographic in 2020.

John Crear, a retired hospital administrator and community leader now in his late 80s, was born in the house Matilda resided in, and her funeral is one of his earliest memories. His grandmother’s strong character apparently passed into family lore. “I was told she was quite rambunctious,” he said.

He discovered more about Matilda when he and his wife carried out some research of their own into the family history. “I had no idea she’d been on the Clotilda,” he said. “It came as a real surprise. Her story gives me mixed emotions because if she hadn’t been brought here, I wouldn’t be here. But it’s hard to read about what she experienced.”

Matilda waited all her life for some form of justice and it would be another 14 years before the civil rights movement began to challenge the systemic racism she faced. Iconic leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X pointed out the hypocritical gap between the ideals of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments and the actual lived reality of African Americans.

In a 1964 speech, Malcolm X demanded: “… our right on this earth … to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society … which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.”

Although Matilda missed out on witnessing any of this, her grandson was active in the civil rights movement. “You can read about slavery and be detached from it,” he told National Geographic. “But when it’s your family that is involved, it becomes up close and very real.” During the Civil Rights movement, he was arrested and imprisoned on charges of assault and battery – for the offence of stopping a white man who attempted to stuff a live snake down his throat.

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