Remembering Matilda, the last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade

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 (US) 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. Abake and her family members were sold as part of a consignment of slaves to one Captain William Foster of Canadian origin.
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.

Separated and sold – a brutal but common fate
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.
Because the couple were classed as “property”, their marriage was not recognised by law; it was simply a means of producing more slave offspring. Even the intimacy of a man and a woman was subject to the absolute control of slave-owners. Grace and Guy were given the surname of their new owner and put to work in his cotton fields.
The adult Matilda had only a hazy recollection of those early years, but later recalled one episode when, aged three, she and her sister Sally escaped from the plantation to a nearby swamp where they were scented out by the overseer’s dogs and returned to their quarters. Matilda was still a small child when the Civil War broke out in the US in April 1861. President Abraham Lincoln made his Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring that all enslaved people in the Confederate states were free.
This had no immediate effect on Matilda and her family, as the Civil War continued to rage. But when the Confederates were defeated on June 19, 1865, Matilda and her family were liberated. Matilda would have been about seven years old at this time. Her family headed north and settled in Athens, Alabama. It is not known how they supported themselves. Matilda later related how she learned English quickly as a small child and would help interpret for her mother and stepfather, who faced challenges with this new language.

Slavery in all but name
Upon her emancipation, Matilda and her family thus became supposedly free people. But, as Martin Luther King Jr pointed out in a 1968 sermon, “Emancipation for the Negro was only a proclamation. It was not a fact. The Negro still lives in chains: the chains of economic slavery, the chains of social segregation, the chains of political disenfranchisement.” Such were the harsh conditions in which Matilda grew up. Her childhood ended abruptly at the age of 14, when she first gave birth, likely as the result of rape, given the prevalence of white male sexual violence towards Black girls and women in the south at that time.
Matilda later entered a common-law partnership with a German-born man called Jacob Schuler and had a total of 14 children, 10 of whom survived into adulthood. What befell the other four is unknown. Whether she was prevented from marrying her partner by the ban on interracial marriage, or chose that arrangement, is also not known.
In any case, Matilda appears not to have benefitted financially from the relationship, as she remained a sharecropper, living in the vicinity of Selma, Alabama, for most of her working life. At some point, she changed her surname from Creagh to McCrear, perhaps to distance herself from her enslaver and as an assertion of her own identity. Over the generations, the family surname has seen a number of further variations, including Crear, Creah, Creagher and McCreer.

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.” 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. (Excerpt from Al Jazeera)