I’ve never heard of a slave ship landing in the US in 1860.
Pretty interesting:
“Clotilda was a two-masted schooner, 86 feet (26 m) long with a beam of 23 feet (7.0 m), and a copper-sheathed hull. Meaher had learned that West African tribes were fighting and that the King of Dahomey (now Benin) was willing to sell African slaves taken in warfare. The King of Dahomey’s forces had been raiding communities in the interior, bringing slaves to the port of Whydah, which had a large slave market.
Departing on March 4, 1860, Foster sailed from Mobile with a crew of 12, including himself. In addition to supplies, he carried $9,000 in gold for purchase of slaves. He arrived in Whydah on May 15, 1860, where he had the ship outfitted to carry slaves, using materials he had transported there. He offered to buy some 125 Africans in Whydah for $100 each. They were primarily Tarkbar people taken in a raid from near Tamale, present-day Ghana. He described meeting an African prince and being taken to the king’s court, where he also observed some religious practices. According to his journal, Foster was allowed to review 4,000 captive Africans held in a warehouse, from whom he chose 125 for purchase.
As the slaves were being loaded, Foster saw two steamers off the port and ordered the crew to leave immediately, although only 110 slaves had been secured on board. He ordered Clotilda to sail without the last fifteen slaves, in order to avoid capture. After making their way for a time, they saw a ‘man of war’, but were saved when a squall came up and they could outrun the ship...
... Fearful of criminal charges, Captain Foster brought the schooner in to the Port of Mobile at night and had it towed up the Spanish River to the Alabama River at Twelve Mile Island. He transferred the slaves to a river steamboat to take further upriver, then burned Clotilda “to the water’s edge” before sinking it...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clotilda_%28slave_ship%29
This stood out to me: “According to his journal, Foster was allowed to review 4,000 captive Africans held in a warehouse, from whom he chose 125 for purchase.”
The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo. To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018
It landed near Mobile Bay. The slaves were hid out for a period of time and the ship was burned by the owners to avoid detection. The article goes on to say that the owners of the ship had bet $100,000 that they could import slaves into the US, even though that was against the law.