News: Low Tides During Bomb Cyclone Reveals Slave Transport Vessel at Mobile, Alabama Found on Alabama Coast

 Wreck Found by Reporter may be Last American Slave Ship, Ben Raines,  AL.com, January 23, 2018.

Relying on historical records and accounts from old timers, AL.com may have located the long-lost wreck of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to bring human cargo to the United States.

What's left of the ship lies partially buried in mud alongside an island in the lower Mobile-Tensaw Delta, a few miles north of the city of Mobile. The hull is tipped to the port side, which appears almost completely buried in mud. The entire length of the starboard side, however, is almost fully exposed. The wreck, which is normally underwater, was exposed during extreme low tides brought on by the same weather system that brought the "Bomb Cyclone" to the Eastern Seaboard. Low tide around Mobile was about two and a half feet below normal thanks to north winds that blew for days.
"I'm quaking with excitement. This would be a story of world historical significance, if this is the Clotilda," said John Sledge, a senior historian with Mobile Historical Commission, and author of The Mobile River, an exhaustive history of the river. "It's certainly in the right vicinity... We always knew it should be right around there."

This reporter, Ben Raines, used the abnormally low tides to search for the ship after researching possible locations. The remote spot where the ship was found, deep in the swampy Mobile-Tensaw Delta, is accessible only by boat. During my first trips after discovering the wreck, I documented it with photographs and aerials shot with a drone. Over the next week, I ferried a shipwright expert in the construction techniques used on old wooden vessels and a team of archaeologists from the University of West Florida to the site.

All concluded that the wreck dated to the mid 1800s (the Clotilda was built in 1855), and featured construction techniques typical of Gulf Coast schooners used to haul lumber and other heavy cargo, as the Clotilda was designed to do. The vessel also bore telltale signs of being burned, as the Clotilda reportedly was. In later years, the slavers bragged of burning the ship at the conclusion of their voyage in July of 1860 in an effort to hide proof of their human trafficking. Evidence of a fire on the wreck included a distinctive patina on wrought iron chain plates used to hold the masts and bowsprit in place, and charred beams and timbers in the ship's interior.

"These ships were the 18-wheelers of their day. They were designed to haul a huge amount of cargo in relatively shallow water," said Winthrop Turner, a shipwright specializing in wooden vessels. "That's why you see the exceptional number of big iron drifts used to hold the planking together. That's also why the sides of the ship are so stout. They are almost two feet thick. The construction techniques here, no threaded bolts, iron drifts, butt jointed planking, these all confirm a ship built between 1850 and 1880."

Full Text and Video at Alabama.com

News---$25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Award For Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Research

University of Washington, Seattle, Professor Wins $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize

Stephanie E. Smallwood, Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle, has been selected as the winner of the 2008 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded for the best book written in English on slavery or abolition. Smallwood won for her book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. The book examines the transatlantic slave trade and the relationships between Africa and the new world. The prize is awarded by Yale University's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and
Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

In addition to Smallwood, the other finalists for the prize were Anthony E. Kaye for Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South; Kristin Mann for Slavery and the Birth of an African City: Lagos, 1760-1900; and Chandra Manning for What this Cruel War was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. The $25,000 annual award is the most generous history prize in the field. The prize will be presented to Smallwood at a dinner in New York City in February 2009. This year's finalists were selected from a field of over seventy five entries by a jury of scholars that included Barrymore Anthony Bogues (Brown University), Christopher Clark (University of Connecticut), and Rebecca J. Scott (University of Michigan School of Law). The winner was selected by a review committee of representatives from the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Yale University.

"Saltwater Slavery is a remarkable account of the transatlantic slave trade
that will lead scholars to rethink their understanding of the 'middle passage,' Africa's diaspora, and the relationships between Africa and the New World, says Clark, the 2008 Douglass Prize Jury Chair and Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. "Stephanie Smallwood uses records of the English Royal African Company's trade with the Gold Coast to provide insights into the lives of the men and women the company bought, transported, and offered for sale in the Americas. Tracing the steps that led from captivity in Africa to final sale in the New World, Smallwood gets behind the generalities that often characterize studies of the slave trade. She shows how at each stage captives found themselves transformed and re-presented as commodities - for purchase by merchants; for confinement aboard ship; and for resale as plantation workers or servants."

"Above all, Smallwood depicts the estrangement that removed captives not only from the social and familial circles of kinship, but also from the spiritual connections with kin that could sustain a good life and a good death. Slaves built new kinship networks to save themselves from social death, but often their efforts were cut off by resale or premature mortality. Deploying slaves' own metaphor of "saltwater slavery" to illuminate the meanings of the Atlantic slave system, Stephanie Smallwood
opens up new avenues for historians and anthropologists to explore. This is a subtle, powerful study of the deep horrors of slavery and the slave trade."

The Frederick Douglass Book Prize was established in 1999 to stimulate scholarship in the field of slavery and abolition by honoring outstanding books. Previous winners were Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan in 1999; David Eltis, 2000; David Blight, 2001; Robert Harms and John Stauffer, 2002; James F. Brooks and Seymour Drescher, 2003; Jean Fagan Yellin, 2004; Laurent Dubois, 2005; Rebecca J. Scott, 2006, and Christopher Leslie Brown, 2007.

Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History promotes
the study and love of American history. The Institute serves teachers,
students, scholars, and the general public. It helps create history-centered
schools, organizes seminars and programs for educators, produces print and
electronic publications and traveling exhibitions, sponsors lectures by
eminent historians, and administers a History Teacher of the Year Award in
every state through its partnership with Preserve America. The Institute
also conducts awards including the Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and George
Washington Book Prizes, and offers fellowships for scholars to work in the
Gilder Lehrman Collection. The Institute maintains two websites,
www.gilderlehrman.org and the quarterly online journal www.historynow.org.

Text Source: The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Yale University. Some sentences were deleted from original text for the purpose brevity by CWL.

CWL---Slavery, Freedom And The Law In the Atlantic World

Slavery, Freedom, and the Law in the Atlantic World: A Brief History with Documents, Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, Bedford/St. Martin's, 224 pp., illustrations, bibliography, chronology, index, 2007, $15.95.

In an introductory essay of 28 pages, the authors set 46 documents (1685-1888) into the context of the unfolding history of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic World of Europe, Africa and the Americas. Political traditions, economic pressures, religious settings and social environments are adequately described regarding the continents. Slavery and freedom in the French Atlantic and the Haitian Revolution, the British Atlantic and the United States, the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic and the Latin American continent.

How did legal institutions of the nations generate and mediate freedom? In the dynamic centuries from the 1600s to the 1800s, freedom and revolution, Independence and slavery were concepts and conduct that conceived American slavery. The authors point out that in the era of North American colonization Britain had no laws regarding slavery because slavery on the island had died out as a legal category within English law. It was because of this that in the 1772 Somerset decision the English bar declared a slave free; no laws existed and the English tradition was that the English were a free people. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield ruled that a slave brought into Great Britain could not be held in bondage because there were no codes of law, oral or written, that created or supported slavery in Britain.

The authors outline the historiography of the question: Why did the world's biggest slave trader abolish an institution that was a major source of wealth for the empire. Quickly covering five major historians' views, the introductory essay establishes the Amistad decision as a provocation to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Taney's statement, that a black person has no rights which a white person is obligated to respect, contradicted the Amistad decision. The French, Spanish and Portuguese generated a variety of responses to the growth of slavery in there colonies.

Thirteen documents or document sets are offered on England, the British colonies and the United States. Included are Pennsylvania's 1780 legislative act to gradually abolish slavery in the commonwealth and the 1837 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision on whether a free man of color has the right to vote.

This book is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as individuals seeking a brief but satisfying essay on the legal status of slaves and slavery in the Western hemisphere.

New on CWL's Personal Bookshelf: Slave Ships

The Slave Ship, A Human History, Marcus Rediker, Viking Press, 434 pp., hardcover. 36 b/w illustrations, 7 maps, index, end notes, 2007. $27.95.

Rediker, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, has written previously about the Atlantic pirates, laborers on Atlantic maritime trade in the colonial through early national period, and authored Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics Culture and Society: Volume 1. Human labor in the early and middle periods of U.S. history is his field of speciality. A master of the telling anecdote, he has no obvious ideological axe to grind other than to tell story of laborers, the good ones, the bad ones and the ugly ones.

My goal is to read it by the last week of December.