The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade

by Hannah Durkin

An estimated 10.7 million Africans were displaced to the Americas between the turn of the sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, an additional 15 per cent – about 1.8 million people – died on the Atlantic voyage, and perhaps as many as six million more people died in slave raids, on the journey to the West African coast, and in the barracoons (slave pens) that held them prisoner before they could be shipped across the ocean. An African person enslaved in the Americas had a life expectancy of around seven years.25

‘We crossed the Ogun [River] and suddenly encountered one of the saddest spectacles in Africa, a village only a few days before full of life and activity, now entirely depopulated, its inhabitants captured as slaves, itself in ruins and ashes.’

Of the approximately 965,000 people living in the state on the eve of the Civil War, about 435, 000 – just under half – were enslaved.

Despite the 1808 ban, New York was a hub of slave-trading activity in the 1850s. Dozens of slave ships bound for Africa were sent from Lower Manhattan each year. US-built slave ships also left Baltimore, Boston, Providence, Salem and other New England ports, and somewhere between fifteen and twenty-eight vessels either owned or outfitted in New Orleans were identified as slavers or caught trafficking people in the years 1857 and 1858 alone.7

Nearly 500 illegal journeys carrying almost 200,000 people were conducted as part of this US–Africa–Cuba trade between 1853 and 1867. Nearly 90 per cent of the slave ships were US-built: vessels registered in the United States and able to fly its flag provided human traffickers with significant protection.

‘We must have Africans,’ De Bow wrote to Virginian enslaver and fellow Fire-Eater Edmund Ruffin.22