Many have heard about the last USA slave ship in Alabama 1860 but have you heard about the 1858....

[IllmaticDelta]

slave ship to Georgia?

Wanderer was the penultimate documented ship to bring an illegal cargo of people from Africa to the United States, landing at Jekyll Island, Georgia on November 28, 1858. It was the last to carry a large cargo, arriving with some 400 people. Clotilda, which transported 110 people from Dahomey in 1860, is the last known ship to bring enslaved people from Africa to the US.

Originally built in New York as a pleasure schooner, The Wanderer was purchased by Southern businessman Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar and an investment group, and used in a conspiracy to import kidnapped people illegally. The Atlantic slave trade had been prohibited under US law since 1808. An estimated 409 enslaved people survived the voyage from the Congo to Georgia. Reports of the smuggling outraged the North. The federal government prosecuted Lamar and other investors, the captain and crew in 1860, but failed to win a conviction.

In his ship's log, Corrie noted arriving at Bengula (probably Benguela in present-day Angola) on October 4, 1858. Wanderer took on 487 slaves between the Congo and Benguela, which is located forty miles south of the Congo river.[10] After a six-week return voyage across the Atlantic, Wanderer arrived at Jekyll Island, Georgia, around sunset on November 28, 1858. The tally sheets and passenger records showed that 409 slaves survived the passage. They were landed at Jekyll Island, which was owned by John and Henry DuBignon, Jr., who conspired with Lamar.[11] These figures present a slightly higher mortality rate than the estimated average of 12 percent during the illegal trading era.[12] Hoping to evade arrest, Lamar had the slaves shipped to markets in Savannah and Augusta, Georgia; South Carolina and Florida.[8]

As the federal government investigated, news of the slave ship raised outrage in the North. Southerners pressed Congress to reopen the Atlantic trade. The federal government tried Lamar and his conspirators three times for piracy, but was unable to get a conviction. It failed to convince a jury of a connection between Lamar and the ship.[8]

Left to right: Cilucangy [Slave name Ward Lee]; Pucka Geata [Slave name Tucker Henderson]; Tahro [Slave name Romeo Thomas]


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Clockwise from top left: Zow Uncola [Slave name Tom Johnson]; Manchuella [Slave name Katie Noble]; Lucy Lanham [she was too young to remember her African name]; Mabiala [Slave name Uster Williams].



Congress outlawed the importation of slaves in 1807, but such activity continued clandestinely in the South; it had become much more difficult by the 1850s, with the Royal Navy patrolling the coast of West Africa. Though the Wanderer was long considered the last American slave ship, recent scholarship has discovered that another slave ship, the Clotilda, landed in Mobile a little over a year later, in 1860.

 

[Black Haven]

Any new updates on their descendants like the clotilda descendants in mobile?

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Any new updates on their descendants like the clotilda descendants in mobile?

Some on here--> The Wanderer Project

and

 

[xoxodede]

I went to the website, but is there a place that list all the names of those who made it over here? I would love to look them up and their descendants on FamilySearch.org.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

I went to the website, but is there a place that list all the names of those how made it over here? I would love to look them up and their descendants on FamilySearch.org.

I haven't seen a complete list.

 

[Samori Toure]

Pretty good stuff.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Some more names in here along with some locations outside of Carolina/Georgia

Although the 407 Africans aboard were illegal cargo, a group of Southern planters, led by Charles Lamar of Savannah, Georgia, conspired to acquire the slaves. He and his cohorts hoped their actions would lead to a reopening of the slave trade and secession from the Union.[32] Many of the Wanderer slaves were put on barges and trains going to Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. About half were sent aboard the steamboat Augusta, which sailed up the Savannah River to a plantation owned by Charles Lamar’s cousin Thomas Lamar. From there, many were sent to work in northern Georgia and South Carolina, including in the Edgefield area.

In 1908 anthropologist Charles Montgomery interviewed seven of the Wanderer Africans living in the Edgefield County, Aiken County, and Augusta area: Tucker Henderson, Tom Johnson, Lucy Lanham, Ward Lee, Katie Noble, Romeo Thomas, and Uster Williams.[33] Based on Montgomery’s writings, Kikongo language scholars John Thornton and Linda Heywood assert that Tom Johnson, Lucy Lanham, Katie Noble, and Romeo Thomas came from the same area of Madimba in the valley of the Mbidizi River in the Kingdom of Kongo

Claudia Arzeno Mooney, April L. Hynes, and Mark M. Newell | African-American Face Vessels: History and Ritual in 19th-Century Edgefield | Ceramics in America 2013