Cudjoe Lewis

January 29th, 2010

Cudjoe Lewis was the last surviving African slave to have been forcibly transported across the Atlantic to America. He was bought in 1860 for just $50  in what was then the West African kingdom of Dahomey - now the Republic of Benin - and brought to the port of Mobile aboard the slave-ship Clotilde. He was freed at the end of the Civil War and elected to remain in Alabama. He died in 1935 in what is now the suburban Mobile neighborhood of Prichard, aged about 94.

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  • Alasdair

    This was one that fascinated me in the book... I sat there and pondered for a while... for some reason I never wondered when the last African slave would have died, I was surprised it wasn't later but that would probably have been slaves born in the US

  • Anonymous

    I wish there was a recording of his memories, maybe from the Writers' Project of the Great Depression era.

    He arrived in Mobile just before my great-grandfather John was drafted into the Union Army. John could have bought his way out by paying a bounty of $300 to hire another man to go in his place. He said that he couldn't pay to put another man in harm's way (but, I suspect that, as a subsistance farmer in Maine, he didn't have the cash). The upshot was that he was drummed out of Quaker meeting, and served as a trainer and driver of oxen during the war. He came back to find that his wife (and mother of 10 kids) had died, so he married the widow of another soldier and had 4 more children with her, including my grandfather, who he named after the Methodist minister, John Wesley, partly out of spite that he was being shunned by the Quakers.