S6 Ep17: Meaher's Illegal Gamble: The Last Slave Ship
Crimes of the Centuries
Amber Hunt and Audioboom
4.7 • 4K Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1859, a wealthy Alabama landowner made a bet that he could do the unthinkable. The next spring, he did just that — trafficking human beings from West Africa to the United States a half-century after it had been made a federal crime punishable by death. The Clotilda brought back 110 men, women and children. For more than 150 years, the ship sat buried in the mud of a Mobile Bay bayou, as if the whole thing had never happened.
Crimes of the Centuries is a podcast from Grab Bag Collab exploring forgotten crimes from times past that made a mark and helped change history. You can get early and ad-free episodes and more over at www.grabbagcollab.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society, or even |
| 0:13.0 | earn the label, Crime of the Century. |
| 0:16.0 | But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today. |
| 0:22.3 | I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist, an author, and in each episode of this show, |
| 0:27.0 | I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today, but was huge when it happened. |
| 0:33.8 | This is Crimes of the Centuries. |
| 0:46.1 | Thank you. This is Crimes of the Centuries. In the Antebellum South, there were two kinds of secrets, the well-kept ones, |
| 0:51.7 | and the ones that were regularly brought into the light of day to be gossiped |
| 0:55.9 | over, but never in front of the wrong people. One of the most enduring of the latter had to do with a |
| 1:02.3 | ship, a treacherous voyage, and a bet, which sounds romantic, but is anything but. The story goes that some men got to drinking one cool and damp November night while on a |
| 1:15.1 | steamboat that was churning its way through the bayous around Mobile. |
| 1:19.4 | It was 1859 and the likelihood of an upcoming showdown between the southern states |
| 1:24.9 | and the northern ones about the defensibility of slavery was on everyone's tongue. |
| 1:30.3 | You know this, of course, but humor me a very brief, overly simplistic cliffs notes on history. |
| 1:37.3 | The North thought slavery was a moral catastrophe and an embarrassment on the world stage. |
| 1:43.3 | The South thought, accurately, that it was the foundation of their entire economy. |
| 1:49.5 | But don't be confused. |
| 1:50.9 | They didn't consider it a necessary evil. |
| 1:53.8 | They liked it. |
| 1:54.8 | It worked for them. |
| 1:56.7 | And they viewed the upcoming war as a personal affront to their dignity and pride. |
| 2:02.0 | Who were those other people to tell them what to do with their money and their land? |
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