Confederate revival of the transatlantic slave trade

Reckoning with the Slave Ship Clotilda
A new documentary tells the story of the last known slave ship to enter the United States and takes on the difficult question of how to memorialize America’s history of racial violence.
By Vera Carothers

September 21, 2022

In Margaret Brown’s documentary “Descendant,” a man named Anderson Flen walks through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and wonders aloud about the people who walked there before him, people who had less freedom and fewer opportunities. He’s from Africatown, a freed Black settlement on the Gulf Coast, founded by people who were brought over on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to reach the United States. Flen, who is seventy-two, is working with community members and preservationists to transform Africatown into a tourist destination that honors the legacy of enslaved Black people. The purpose of his trip to Montgomery is to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, widely known as the national lynching memorial, which was opened in 2018 by the civil-rights lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson and is an important reference point for Africatown’s efforts.

The imposing memorial features hundreds of hanging steel rectangles, representing the more than four thousand African Americans who were lynched during the Jim Crow era. (The count is based on research done by the Equal Justice Initiative.) After touring the six-acre site, Flen seems to lose the spring in his step. He looks away from the camera and sighs. He says, “The real test a lot of times is not in coming. It’s what do you do when you leave? . . . Most of the people who come here, I’m sure, have been blessed beyond imagination. This is just a blip in their lives, a few seconds.” He worries that the memorial will become “another form of entertainment.”

Preservationists and historians and institutional leaders have seized on the surge of racial uproar in recent years by creating dozens of museum exhibits, monuments, and memorials that grapple with racism in the U.S. The opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in 2016, helped lead this renaissance. Yet, as Flen senses in Montgomery, key questions remain unanswered: What is the best way to memorialize the history of racial violence? Can focussing on the past change our present? And what is owed specifically to the families of those who endured these crimes against humanity? Those questions are central to “Descendant,” which débuted at Sundance in January. It was acquired by Netflix and Higher Ground, the Obamas’ production company, and will be released in October after showing at the New York Film Festival.

Brown, in her early fifties, grew up white in Mobile, Alabama, whose center is three miles from Africatown. She is the daughter of a reluctant débutante mother and a Jewish songwriter father. A sensitive child, she was frightened when her father pointed out houses owned by K.K.K. members, warning her to be careful and know her place as a Jew. But she had blue eyes and told me that she was “invisibly Jewish.” Her 2008 documentary, “The Order of Myths,” examined the fraught racial and class dynamics of Mardi Gras in Mobile. Her subsequent films focussed on the devastating effects of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill on working-class Gulf Coast communities, as well as the voter-suppression efforts directed at rural African Americans in Alabama’s Black Belt. While shooting the Mardi Gras film, she was exposed more deeply to the story of the Clotilda and the origins of Africatown—she didn’t remember learning it in school. A decade later, Brown set out to tell this story from the perspectives of descendants from both Black and white sides, but, when she approached the family of the white man who’d paid for the voyage, they refused to speak to her.

In “Descendant,” the present-day Black descendants of those enslaved on the Clotilda fight to preserve the stories of their ancestors in the face of historical erasure. The most well-known ancestor is Cudjo Lewis, who helped found Africatown, where many Clotilda descendants still live. In 1928, Zora Neale Hurston spoke to Cudjo for an oral history, which would later become the book “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo.’ ” The film is interspersed with excerpts from this interview, read by descendants in the places that Cudjo lived and worked. Publishers rejected Hurston’s manuscript, objecting to her choice to phonetically render his Black vernacular speech, a rich mix of Yoruba and English. The manuscript remained unpublished until 2018, the same year that Brown started shooting her film.

In “Barracoon,” Cudjo recounts the story of the Clotilda. It is often said that in the run-up to the Civil War a wealthy businessman named Timothy Meaher made a bet that he could bring a ship full of Africans to Mobile and not be caught. The federal government had outlawed the importation of human cargo some fifty years prior, and Meaher and his friends were eager to prove that they could flout national regulations, according to Sylviane Diouf, a leading historian of the Clotilda. Meaher bought a schooner for a voyage to Ouidah, in the kingdom of Dahomey, in modern-day Benin, where he funded the purchase of a hundred and ten young men and women. When the Africans arrived in Alabama, they were forced off the ship and made to hide in the swamplands. The schooner was burned and scuttled to destroy evidence of the voyage; Meaher would have faced the death penalty if discovered. The captives were enslaved and put to work locally or sent to plantations farther away. Five years later, at the end of the Civil War, these men and women gained their freedom, but Meaher refused to give them land. Instead, he and others sold many of them small parcels on which they founded Africatown, an autonomous community where they grew food, ran businesses, and taught the next generation their customs and languages. They built a cemetery that faced east, toward Africa. The Meaher family is still one of the biggest landowners in Mobile, and over the years they have leased their land to industrial plants that have polluted the land and contributed to a public-health crisis in the community, according to research done by the Mobile Environmental Justice Action Coalition. They have never apologized for the Clotilda voyage.

In 2019, marine scientists confirmed the discovery of the Clotilda’s remains, in a remote stretch of the Mobile river, near land belonging to the Meaher family. The discovery provided the Africatown community with scientific validation of their story. (Researchers said last year that the ship was remarkably well preserved and may contain DNA traces.) Following the find, Africatown held a bell-ringing ceremony attended by local politicians and members of national news outlets, including this reporter, who appears briefly in the documentary. In a scene from “Descendant,” once the event has ended, Veda Tunstall, a former real-estate agent whose lineage stems from the Clotilda, reacts to the sudden influx of attention. She fears that her community’s history will “be taken the same way our people were taken.” Of the nascent efforts to build a museum in Africatown and to redevelop the area, she says, “I don’t want to be a part of it, I want to be it.”

At a community meeting in Africatown, an illustration, hidden underneath a piece of cloth, was revealed. It showed what the Clotilda may have looked like, including how the captives were packed into its hold. The moment after the cover is whisked off and a small burst of clapping peters out, the discomfort in the room is palpable as people take in the harrowing depiction of their ancestors lined up head-to-toe in coffinlike slats. Many of the attendees’ faces appear filled with fear and regret. Finally, an older man speaks up. “The pain and suffering that my people have had to endure throughout this whole process is a tremendous burden,” he says. He proposes that “some dollars” come to those related to the Clotilda’s victims. Kamau Sadiki, one of the divers who helped confirm the ship’s discovery, affirms the community’s suffering and suggests, “You all should come up with what justice means to you.”

It is a complicated question with a variety of answers. In the documentary, Joycelyn Davis, a descendant of the Clotilda survivor Charlie Lewis, visits the Lincoln Memorial, in D.C., and dreams big about a similar monument in Africatown. “I hope that it could be appreciated like this,” she says. Emmett Lewis tells his young daughters stories about his great-great-great-grandfather Cudjo, because he wants them to know what he stood for. He says, “My only fear is for my people’s story not to be told.” Tunstall worries about Africatown residents getting priced out as the region becomes a tourist attraction, while expressing ambivalence about reparations. “As long as Timothy Meaher is not here, I don’t think there’s anybody to punish,” she says. Garry Lumbers, a member of the Clotilda Descendants Association, points out that, although news articles and books have come out about Africatown, the community is still suffering economically and socially. “It looks like a war,” he says.

These attempts to grapple with what justice might mean resonate well beyond Africatown. People around the country, and the world, are watching to see how America’s history of racial violence will be memorialized. Sheila Flanagan, the former director of programs at the History Museum of Mobile, states that most African Americans, unlike the descendants of the Clotilda, don’t know where their African ancestors came from. Now, she says, “the African American community for one time can say, ‘This is real. . . . We won’t have to wonder anymore. This actually happened.’ ”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a professor of history at the Harvard Kennedy School who studies truth and reconciliation efforts from Belfast to Rwanda, believes that memorializing victims of structural racism is an important part of a larger movement of racial reckoning in the U.S. but that memorials alone are “insufficient to the harder work of transforming a society.” These efforts don’t go far enough, he told me, because they are too “passive” and easy to skip. He cited the importance of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial being placed in the heart of downtown, and said that memorials need to “confront the spatial segregation that exists” and “penetrate areas that people cannot avoid.” A museum in Africatown, he worried, would allow people to “opt out” of learning about the history of the Clotilda.

Stevenson, the civil-rights lawyer and founder of the national lynching memorial, addressed this problem by adding a second set of steel rectangles to the memorial, each one representing a U.S. county where lynchings took place. He invited the respective counties to claim their monuments and to establish a memorial on their home ground to lynching victims. He also required each county to demonstrate that its community was taking steps toward economic and racial justice before acquiring its column. The unclaimed monuments that remain on display at the national lynching memorial serve as a reminder of the lack of redress across the country.

Muhammad also pointed out that there has been “no state-sponsored mechanism” to address the harms of slavery and the ongoing systemic racism in the U.S. That may be changing. In February, 2021, the congresspersons Barbara Lee and Cory Booker reintroduced legislation for the creation of a national commission to address “truth, racial healing, and transformation,” which was first presented by Representative Lee following George Floyd’s murder. This will surely be easier said than done. In the film, one Clotilda descendant says, “I still don’t know what my idea of justice is.” Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and founding director of the N.M.A.A.H.C., told me that, for him, reparations would mean providing “educational opportunities for all,” as such opportunities would be what “would make so many of those enslaved ancestors smile.” Muhammad argued that school is the best channel for “acceptance and acknowledgment” to be disseminated in society. Yet the increased efforts to present schoolchildren with the truth about America’s racial history have resulted in laws limiting what can be taught passing or getting introduced in at least forty state legislatures. “Putting up a monument might actually be easier anywhere in this country than changing how we teach each other and our children about what happened,” Muhammad said.

What justice, then, can a monument or museum bring? Brent Leggs, a preservationist and the director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund at the National Trust, told me that historic preservation is “a form of repair and a way to correct past injustice.” For Leggs, a historic site has the unique ability to reduce the gap between space and time. Brown said that the aim of her film was similar: to illustrate that “the past is in the present, always.” For decades, historic sites in the U.S. cemented a narrative that positioned whites as heroes and erased the contributions of Black people, among other groups. Leggs hopes that a “greater reverence for Black history” could lead to a “greater reverence for Black bodies and Black people.” Mary Elliott, the curator of American slavery at the N.M.A.A.H.C., described how, after visiting the museum, many people across racial, political, and class divides express frustration at not having been taught this history. “It’s all our stories,” she said.

Ultimately, “Descendant” is not only about justice but also about memory. How can we be better by facing the past, individually and as a society? As Americans struggle to come to terms with the atrocities of racial violence, these questions are contentious and uncomfortable. The only certain thing is that we cannot look away. ♦

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of A+E Networks.

On July 4, 1858, one of America’s fastest racing yachts departed Charleston, South Carolina, to a chorus of saluting cannons. Crowds along the waterfront waved flags and handkerchiefs as Wanderer slipped away from the shore with the triangular pennant of the prestigious New York Yacht Club flapping proudly in the breeze. In spite of the send-off, the speedy schooner wasn’t destined for another regatta. Instead, on a day when the United States celebrated its independence, the Wanderer was off on a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to deprive hundreds of their freedom.

A little more than two months later, William Bowden, commander of the British warship HMS Medusa, peered through his spyglass and spotted the sleek American yacht in the mouth of the Congo River. On patrol along the African coastline in search of illegal slave ships, Bowden boarded Wanderer and was struck by its opulence—gilded mirrors, rosewood furniture, satinwood cupboards, ornamental brasswork and “all that could be desired for comfort and luxury,” as the New York Times reported. At the invitation of the Americans, British officers dined on fine damask linens in the salon and sipped champagne and smoked cigars on the deck as Captain John Egbert Farnum regaled them with tales of his adventures in the Mexican-American War and serving as a guerrilla fighter in Nicaragua and Cuba.

Toward the end of the evening, Farnum jokingly asked his guests if they wished to inspect the yacht to ensure it wasn’t a slave ship. The British officers laughed at what seemed a preposterous idea for surely no vessel that extravagant would be used in the slave trade. The prestige of the New York Yacht Club banner that continued to fly from Wanderer’s main mast, however, shrouded its odious mission for hidden from view were supplies that Wanderer took on in Charleston—chains, handcuffs and enough Georgia pine to build a secret slave deck.

As soon as the British departed, the Americans resumed their vile—and illegal—work building pens in which to squirrel away human cargo. Congress voted to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and made it a crime punishable by death in 1820. Wanderer’s Southern owners, however, had little regard for federal laws. New York Yacht Club member William Corrie and Charles Lamar, a member of a prominent Southern family, purchased the one-year-old ship from Louisiana sugar magnate John D. Johnson in the spring of 1858 and immediately set about retrofitting one of the quickest yachts of its day into a slave ship.

Among a group of pro-slavery radicals known as “fire-eaters,” Corrie and Lamar supported Southern secession and wanted the international slave trade reopened. Even if American law banned the importation of slaves, the fire-eaters wished to prove the impotence of the federal government to stop them. As the New York Times described, the radicals believed that if arrested they could “trust to the laxity of officials, the defects of proof, the technicalities of the law, and especially the sympathy of jurors, for escape from punishment.”

As Wanderer’s elaborate retrofit progressed in Port Jefferson, New York, a customs official grew increasingly suspicious—especially when extra-large water tanks capable of holding 15,000 gallons were hauled aboard and Farnum, a known troublemaker, was spotted in the town. The New York Times wondered aloud whether the yacht might be transformed into a slave ship but acknowledged how absurd the notion was “that a vessel so costly, and so well adapted for a gentleman to spend his elegant leisure in, should be selected as a slaver.” Government officials ordered the ship to New York City for a thorough inspection. Although there was such a volume of supplies that “showed that an extraordinary voyage of some kind was contemplated,” nothing could specifically implicate the vessel as a slave ship. Customs officials had no choice but to let it proceed to Charleston and onto Africa where in exchange for rum, gunpowder, cutlasses, muskets and other goods, the Southerners secretly purchased nearly 500 slaves—many of them teenage boys—and branded them with hot irons.

After riding wind and waves across the Atlantic Ocean, Wanderer dropped anchor at Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia on November 28, 1858, with 400 African slaves. Approximately 70 of those held in bondage died in the brutal conditions and foul air of the ship’s hold during the six-week journey. The slavers quickly smuggled their human cargo ashore in small boats and scattered them in plantations and slave markets across the South, where they were sold for upwards of $700 a head.

Reports quickly surfaced, however, of the presence of newly imported slaves from West Africa. Within weeks, authorities had arrested the ringleaders of the criminal enterprise—including Corrie and Lamar—and charged them with slave trading, piracy and other offenses. The defendants stood trial in federal court in Savannah, Georgia, in the summer of 1860, but the result was much as the fire-eaters had imagined. The Southern jury refused to convict their peers, a verdict that further inflamed sectional tensions that burst into the Civil War the following year. Ultimately, the harshest sanction leveled on the conspirators was Corrie’s expulsion from the New York Yacht Club.

Lamar bought the ship back at a quarter of its value, but the United States seized it as an enemy vessel in May 1861 and converted it into a Union gunboat that participated in naval blockades of Confederate ports before sinking off the coast of Cuba in 1871 after a return to commercial use.

The appearance of U.S. resources in the contraband slave trade to Brazil would generate a number of tensions in relations among the United States, Brazil, and Great Britain during the 1840s, contributing to break the relative isolation of U.S. slavery. Only suppression of the contraband slave trade to Brazil in the 1850s would end U.S. participation in that traffic. The political implications of this connection nonetheless continued to reverberate in the U.S. public sphere as slave traders reorganized themselves in the aftermath of Brazilian suppression, transforming New York into one of the main centers for the outfitting of slave voyages in the 1850s. The main destination was now Cuba, but there was still some hope among slave traders in New York that the traffic to Brazil could be reopened. One last attempt was made in 1856, when the Mary E. Smith was seized by Brazilian authorities off the coast of Brazil with the 320 surviving enslaved Africans (some sources say around 520 had left Africa).

How a Cuban Spy Sabotaged New York’s Thriving, Illicit Slave Trade

Emilio Sanchez and the British government fought the lucrative business as American authorities looked the other way

John Harris

March 8, 2021

The men of the “Portuguese Company,” about a dozen in total, arrived in 1850s Manhattan ready to bring the illegal slave trade to America’s mega-metropolis. Hailing from Brazil, Portugal and Angola, the group earned their moniker from their common tongue. They were attracted by New York’s large port, with ample ships and sailors, as well as the city’s vast financial services and lax law enforcement. Posing as merchants in legal business, the Company snapped up hundreds of ships to send to Africa for captives and then to the sugar estates of Cuba. The Company would traffic thousands of Africans for their own enrichment, but they also crossed Cuban immigrant Emilio Sanchez, whose spycraft for the British government would prevent thousands more from enduring the Middle Passage aboard American slave ships.

Sanchez’s turn to informant is just one example of how fighting slavery was a collective effort. A wide cast of characters, from the great orators of the abolitionist movement to the conductors of the Underground Railroad to men like Sanchez fought against the institution of slavery and all its components, including the illegal international slave trade. Their work was dangerous, their foes were powerful – even in the “free” North – and the U.S. government was rarely on their side.

Americans had a long history of ignoring slave trade laws. Despite a federal act in 1807, which banned U.S. participation in the Atlantic slave trade, and another law in 1820, which carried the death penalty, American seamen and vessels remained deeply involved in the traffic to Cuba and Brazil, where the trade was also banned.

In New York, key officials like U.S. Marshal Isaiah Rynders were notoriously sympathetic to slave interests and several took bribes from traffickers to let ships sail out to sea. When slave traders did end up in court, juries rarely convicted. At the federal level, successive Democratic administrations were more interested in preventing the abolitionist British from searching American ships at sea than halting the slave trade.

As American law enforcement remained lax, the Portuguese Company became prolific. One observer with knowledge of the trade wrote in 1856 that “the business is active and pretty steady, not less than two, or three or four vessels getting off every month from New York alone.” There was no shortage in help getting out to sea, he explained, since “gold is generally paid down on the spot for all supplies and services [and] bribery is largely employed, and is relied upon as a sure and successful mode of getting the vessels off.”

Meanwhile, the Portuguese Company thrived. By the late 1850s, they even branched out to other cities like Boston, Baltimore and New Orleans. In all, over 400 slave ships sailed out of U.S. ports bound for the African coast and brought close to 200,000 captives back across the Atlantic Ocean, mainly to Cuba, although some like the Clotilda ended up in the American South. A host of accomplices in American ports—captains, seamen, corrupt officials, ship dealers and merchants supplying provisions for their vessels—also feasted on their ill-gotten gains.

The British government looked on in horror. Previously one of the biggest slave trading nations, by the mid-1800s Britain viewed itself as the world’s beacon of liberty and sent an antislavery fleet to African waters to patrol for illegal slave ships. With strong American opposition to naval interference and lacking solid information on which to base captures, there was little they could do. Meanwhile, the British consul in New York, Edward Archibald, was also stumped. Even when he could learn snippets about the trade, he told his bosses in London that it was “worse than useless” to share them with local authorities.

The British had experience, however, with stubborn slave trading nations. For many years they had channeled money to Brazil and Cuba to pay spies—usually slave traders who had turned their back on the trade, or at least claimed they had. Now it was time to try that tactic in New York.

Emilio Sanchez, who had come to the U.S. in his youth, was an ideal informant. A sugar importer and ship dealer who worked in New York, he operated cheek by jowl with the slave traders and their accomplices in the merchant district of Lower Manhattan. He also had an axe to grind; he had been caught up in one of their failed voyages—unwittingly, he claimed—and had ended up with a bruised reputation and depleted finances. Archibald grilled him on his past dealings and came away convinced that Sanchez had indeed been duped.

Sanchez wanted to be a spy to wreak revenge on the slave traders who had drawn him into their dealings—and he wanted to make money doing it. But although he was never explicit about it, he seems to have had a broader ideological motive. A few years later, he wrote anonymously in the New York press, attacking slave traders and corrupt officials, and making clear his intention to “destroy the slave trade” as a whole.

Archibald was certainly impressed by Sanchez when he met him, and sensing the Cuban immigrant could be useful, he offered him a contract. From 1859 to 1862, Sanchez acted as a full-time informant for the British, working for £400 a year plus bonuses based on captures resulting from his information.

Sanchez worked hard. He ventured onto the docks, mingling with other merchants, sailors, caulkers; anyone who might have news. He struck up what he called “casual conversation” with these men, but he was hard at work, plumbing for information. What ships were leaving for Africa? When? Who owned them? Sometimes he backed off, worrying he would “expose” himself to suspicion, but he gleaned plenty of intelligence. He also thumbed through a dozen newspapers from New York and elsewhere, searching for information on ship departures and arrivals, vital clues on the whereabouts of slavers. He even recruited his brother back in Cuba to write to him about the island’s trade, which was always closely tied to New York’s.

The result was an incredible paper trail. Sanchez wrote detailed letters to Archibald, sometimes several times a week, with the latest news. Most of his letters concerned the names of slave ships and their owners, as well as their whereabouts. A typical letter from 1859 reported a slaver disguised as whaling ship—an occasional ruse of the Portuguese: “Laurens: owned by Lima Viana, a Portuguese in New York…fitted out [as] a whaler under the command of [captain] Curtis.” In the same letter, he also informed Archibald that the Asa Fish had recently left New York “loaded by a Portuguese and cleared … for Porto de Lenha [Africa]” where it would “take in a cargo of slaves.”

Sanchez scribbled at least 178 hundred missives in total. Fearing for his life – with good reason – he often wrote in cypher and never signed his name. Archibald was amazed by this correspondence. A few months into his work, the consul told in superiors in London that Sanchez had been in “almost daily communication” with him, supplying “detailed information of the movements of no fewer than fifty [slave trading] vessels.” Archibald was convinced that this information was derived on “extensive and authentic sources of intelligence.” He was right; in all, Sanchez reported on four in every five slaving voyages that crossed the Atlantic Ocean during his tenure as a spy. Aside from the slave traders themselves, no-one knew the traffic better.

Once Sanchez’s letters reached Archibald, they began an extraordinary journey. The consul quickly spirited them out of New York aboard steamships bound for England. In London, the Foreign Office and the Admiralty reviewed them and sent them on another steamer, a mail packet that linked up with the British fleet off the African coast. The whole journey from New York to the British vessels off the Congo River, where the trade was centered, typically took ten weeks.

The arrival of the letters gave the British squadron a crucial advantage. Because Sanchez often reported slave ships before they had departed the United States and since they were usually sailing vessels that took a long time to reach Africa, Sanchez’s intel often made it to the Congo River before the slavers arrived. Armed with Sanchez’s letters, including a description of incoming ships, the British knew what to look for and lay in wait. When they found the slavers lurking on the coast, they gave chase.

One of these vessels was the Pamphylia, a small sailing ship built in Maine that the Portuguese Company had purchased in Boston and ran out of New York. It arrived near the Congo River late in 1859, successfully evading the British on its inbound voyage. On a remote beach, the slave traders forced over 600 men, women, and children aboard. But as they tried to sail into the Atlantic Ocean, a British cruiser approached. Its commander, who had Sanchez’s information at hand, recognized the Pamphylia and fired at the ship until it surrendered. Thanks to Sanchez’s notes, the voyage had failed.

The capture of slavers like the Pamphylia was a blow against the slave trade. Overall, the British intercepted around 30 slave ships on Sanchez’s information; some already carrying captives, others not. About 20,000 Africans avoided the crossing to the Americas, and the full misery of the middle passage. But the story was not a bright one for intercepted Africans; rather than being freed immediately, the British sent them to work temporarily as indentured laborers in the British Caribbean, thousands of miles from their homes. Meanwhile captured traders were typically dumped on the African coast, the British having neither the jurisdiction to prosecute them, nor the confidence that handing them over to American authorities would result in any action. Slave ships continued to stream out of New York.

(Out of 400 successful round trips. M.)

But as Sanchez labored on into the 1860s the tide was turning. Newly elected President Abraham Lincoln chased the slave traders out of Manhattan and initiated a treaty that finally allowed the British to search American ships. These efforts not only ended the slave trade in the United States, but helped close the trade to Cuba as well. The traffic withered and died within a few years.

These developments also ended Britain’s need for Sanchez. After refusing to pay him what he was due, the British cut him off in 1862. Embittered, Sanchez returned to his old work as a merchant in New York and New Jersey, where he lived modestly until his death 1901. His never spoke publicly about his work as a spy and seemingly took his secret to the grave.

Sanchez’s story and his spy letters—today housed in the British National Archives in London—are largely unknown to historians and the wider world. But the broader narrative is not entirely new. As historians look more closely at antislavery efforts across the United States and beyond they are seeing that people fought slavery with various motivations and in many different ways. Enslaved people were always at the center of that story, as were key figures like Lincoln or Frederick Douglass. And in the case of the illegal slave trade, so too was a Cuban immigrant, who labored night and day to bring the scourage of the Middle Passage to an end.