FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
John Sledge responds to a journalist that called The Clotilda a hoax - Midday Mobile - Monday 7-08-24
There will be no personal nor direct attacks on anyone and I would ask that you please try to keep down the loud cheering and the clapping. There will be no booing and no unruly behavior. With that, this is painful and it will be for a long time. After all, these are a couple of high-stepping turkeys and you know what to say about a high stepper. No step too high for a high stepper. This is midday mobile with Sean Sullivan on FMTalk1065. Well, Sean's a tough guy. I mean, I think everybody knows that. You know, Sean, he took some licks, he hangs in there. Yeah, what's wrong with the video we got? I mean, the deal we got drank pretty good, don't it? Did you hear what I said? So this is a bad council. I had no doubt about them. That doesn't suck. If you don't like it, you're bad. Last question. Were you high on drugs? Last question, kiss my ****. Right away we go. FMTalk1065 at midday mobile. Glad to have you all along. 3430106 gets you through on the telephone line and the text line 3430106. And if you have the FMTalk1065 app, you know, it's like a multi-tool. It's like one of those leather mitts, but it's on your phone. You can do all kind of stuff there. Stream the station, get all our podcasts or social media feeds for the breaking news on their traffic maps, weather information. In addition, though, you can call and text from the app and you can also leave us a talkback message. If you're looking at the microphone icon at the bottom of the front page there, if you press that, let's your recorded message, emails it to the show. And I can play it back here on there. All right, a fan favorite. And most importantly, as I rule this thing as a tyrant, a Sean Sullivan favorite on the show, getting him back on it has been way, way too long. Author, historian, all around good guy extraordinaire, John Sledge joining us now on midday mobile. John, good to talk to you. Likewise, Sean. Thank you so much. How's your summer going? Do anything cool? Well, we got a grandbaby. I first she's going to be a year old next week. So we're going to fly over to Orlando on the old breeze airway, which has been great. And celebrate her first birthday. And just start spoiling. Just what level of spoiling are you planning on? Well, we don't want to be too bad about it, but that's our job. Very good. Talk about family too. Of course, talk about this Wall Street Journal story. But the story I saw last week and really special for me reading it. But I can imagine for you, as a Marine Corps named, a rebuilt landing strip there, this is I guess story came out last week. I don't know when it was announced, but I saw it on CNN last week that they named the airfield at Pella Lou for your dad. Yeah, incredible story. Very moved by that. Dad would have been completely bold over by it. Obviously for those who read his memoir with the old breed at Pella Lou and Okinawa or even who saw the Pacific on HBO will be very familiar with that airfield. The Marines that was in the first Marine Division, they had to charge across it completely in the open on their own power. They weren't at Amtraks or tanks or anything like that. And you know, Dad wrote they were under artillery fire. He talked about shells going off like giant firecrackers. They could hear the fragments of growling and humming around their ears. And the ground seemed way back and forth. It was filled with dust and smoke and noise was terrific. And he, you know, he said that through the haze, he could see Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit. And then as he said that, you know, I know, then I looked neither left nor right, but straight ahead. And the first further we went, the worse it got. They finally got across it. They got into the bushes over through the Japanese opposition. And because the heat there was so incredible, like 115 degrees, he lifted up his boondocker, which was their slang for their shoes and sweat poured out of his boondocker. And one of his buddies said, "Sledgeham, you've been walking home water." As other buddies said, maybe that's why he didn't get hit coming across that airfield. He said he was at that point, just glad that the last cracks had started back up. They couldn't believe that they had survived that. So he said it was one of the worst combat experiences just because of the level of exposure. But he said, you know, because of their excellent training and esprit de corps, it never occurred to them that the attack might fail. And happily it didn't. But so that was a very, very moving story. It's an amazing thing. I mean, just hearing you tell it, your dad's words. I mean, his ability to paint this raw and horrible picture of warfare at the same time that come rotary between guys, you know, that made it so it's just it's always taken me back. People don't know what John's talking about, too, in that I mean, 1,500 U.S. troops killed in that. And with 70% cash relief from the first Marine Regiment. Yeah, really, really terrible. Yeah. And the thing about Pella Lou was that they caught the Marines by surprise was at Pella Lou, the Japanese changed in the battles before that, like Guadalcanal and Boganville and Cape Gloucester. The Japanese would fight for a few days and then they'd pull these big Ben's eye charges and the Marines would mow them down and it would be over. And that's what they all thought was going to happen at Pella Lou. But at Pella Lou, the Japanese decided the bonds they charge ain't working. So they switched to what they called the defense in depth. Pella Lou's a Carl Allen. It's two by five miles and it's all these ridges and caves. And so they built all these mutually supporting positions. There was no front line. There was just this dense mass of dug in fortifications. So they had to go in there and just root them out one by one. And they would not surrender and it made for a much long battle. And they thought it would be two or three days. It's a it's a amazing thing. We've talked about so many times if you all have not read with the old breed, you got to do it here before the end of this month and read it and then you understand the significance here too with this airfield being named for John's dad. So I just when I read that, I thought about you immediately and it's just it's a great thing. It's a great thing. Yeah. No, it's nice. It's really not. It's hopefully send a picture, right? If they have a sign up there or something like that, we can get that posted up. It'd be a good thing. As we talk about mobile history, you are genetically linked to mobile history and also academically linked to mobile history as being a historian and a writer here. So I thought about you pretty much off the bat. When my phone, I was trying to do Fourth of July stuff, man, extended weekend stuff, right? Goofing off boat stuff and all that. And it's my and my phone is to ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Sean, did you see this Saturday into Sunday? Sean, did you see this? Did you see this in this Wall Street Journal story? It was the last slave ship to reach a US or was it a hoax? And I mean, I stopped from doing like boat goof off stuff to read the story and I was I had some issues here. How about you? Yeah. Most definitely. I knew the piece was coming because we had talked to the reporter and the man that he's writing about who claims it's a hoax, a hoax, rather, Eric Colonius had come to town and I had met with him. So I was familiar with what was coming down the pike, but of course did not agree with it. So the parts here, and you don't talk a little bit during the news break, but you're much better versed to do this reading through it for me. One of my first issues was it was like a straw man argument. They picked some things to talk about. And he just in this, it just doesn't talk about a whole bunch of history here that would push back on this narrative. Yeah. Well, for the listeners who aren't who aren't read in, Eric Colonius, who's alleging this is a South Carolina, he's a former Wall Street Journal reporter himself, as well as other magazines and papers. And he wrote a book about 10 years ago about the wanderer, which he titled the last slave ship to come to America. The wanderer was a ship carrying about 400 Africans that landed in either Georgia, South Carolina, I forget. In about 1858, there was a spectacular federal trial and it was a huge story. One of the things that bothered this guy, I think, was that he's calling it the last slave ship to come to America and he missed the whole coattilda now, which, as far as we know, was the last. Coattilda is July of 1860. So a little bit later, it's also closer to the Civil War. So things are more disrupted. Alabama is less than a year away from secession. And this guy, you know, part of what I think's going on is just wounded proud on his part. He wants to say, well, it is the last ship. I'm going to prove it. And so he started looking at the coattilda story and he found some things that were inconsistencies that troubled him and he wanted to bring these to the fore. So that's a little bit of the history of where this guy is coming from. When he, when Cornelius comes in here and says it is peace in his take that this was a hoax, right, that the whole thing was not just misunderstood. This was a fabricated from the whole cloth of hoax. How does that sit with you? I mean, how do you discount that? Well, it's a good question. It's a fair question. And he does raise some points. And I think if it moves the ball on scholarship, all to the, all to the better, he makes a great deal of the fact that there was no federal trial in the case of the coattilda as there was with some lunderer. They never found the slaves. They never found the ship. Of course, we know the ship was burned. These have either wrecked itself. He's just saying that could be anything down there until he doesn't necessarily accept that it's that the evidence that has been found that that would strongly imply that it was tilde. Is it necessarily true? Fair enough. Let's investigate more, find out more, but I've read the full archaeological report. It's fairly convincing to me. But beyond that, you know, say the Timothy Mayer, who commissioned the voyage, hid the slaves up in the river cane, got the federal searchers drunk so that they couldn't conduct a search. And he was good buds with the federal judge in Mobile, who wasn't about prosecuting. So the only formal prosecution of the crime was William Foster, who was the coattilda's captain, was found for not declaring cargo. The cargo, of course, being the slave. So this guy makes a big deal out of the fact, well, there was this big trial with a wanderer, but there wasn't with a coattilda. For the very good reasons why there wasn't with a coattilda. Yeah, well, one year out from secession, one year out, you pointed out this one year out from secession. It's not like the people here in Mobile, whites here in Mobile weren't exactly all about doing what the feds wanted them to do. No, and I will also say that that colonialist is not the first person to allege that it was a hoax. He knows that Booker T. Washington didn't think the story was true. Of course, that's in like 1999, 1910. But even at the time, the original newspaper story in the register about the ship landing was just a couple of sentences. And then that got repeated around the country as was typical during that day. It was also another snippet in the paper saying, okay, this nonsense needs to stop. Everybody stirred up about it. This is all, you know, some wags put this out there. It's all a hoax. Well, so there have been people that have argued that, knowing what I know about Timothy Mayer, who was an ardent, even though he was a new Englander, a manor, he was an ardent proponent of slavery. He did everything he could to further it and advocate it. And he put his money where his mouth was. He financed filibuster expeditions down into Nicaragua, like William Walker, so-called "Grandmen of Destiny." The people wanted to establish a slave empire in Central America. The name of Mayer's riverboat was the Roger B. Taney. That was the Supreme Court justice who decided the dread cuts got decision. That said a black man had no rights, that a white man was bound to honor. Mayer had another boat called the Southern Republic. He was a bulkhead runner during the Civil War. He helped finance Confederate naval vessels. So it's perfectly within character for him to finance a voyage to bring back slaves, even though it was illegal, just to prove a point and to make an argument that the slave trade should be reopened. So he was not a bluffer. And it doesn't make any sense to me that he would just put this out there as a fake story to go to government. That wasn't his nature. His nature was to act on these things. And this is perfectly in keeping with what we know about his character. You know, John, from subjective to objective, back to the Clotilda itself, maybe I've gotten something wrong, but conversations I had with Ben Raines too, he had the shipwright's drawings of the Clotilda. So when they found the second ship, first one would write, the measurements have been taken. And I mean, maritime history, I'm going to defer to the king here talking to you. I mean, these were not, these weren't mass produced. I mean, a ship would be pretty dang unique, right? Very true. In the case of the Clotilda, the measurements are exact, the type of wood and where that wood is, is what the record shows. Also, the fact that it had a 13 foot center board, they found the center board. Also, you know, they found the slave timbering that they used to build the slave bedding beneath the deck because a lot of the hole is intact down there in the mud. So no, you're not going to find a board that says Clotilda on it. But we know a lot about the Gulf Coast schooner as a type. We know how many were built, where they were built. And the Clotilda has been well documented in that regard. And everything about this wreck screams, you know, it lines up perfectly. But sure, I would argue that further archaeology is merited and can certainly tell us more, given the momentousness of this subject, American and world history, you know, we would love to know more. So I, you know, I hope they'll go forward and continue to investigate that wreck. But not only that, but the descendants themselves, the stories and the oral traditions within their families, Kujo Lewis meeting with Zornil Hurston, he never mentioned the wanderer. We know there were wanderer slaves in Mobile, who eventually made their way here. I don't dispute that. But not 110 of them, and not enough to have this kind of a coherent community with these traditions that go all the way back the way they do in Africa town. And the stories being, of course, over time is one thing. But early on, if you were telling some story that did not happen, there were so many else in Africa town that was said, no, but they didn't. They had the same story. Yeah, no, it's remarkably consistent. And now, of course, there have been people up there that did, you know, for various reasons, people coming from all different directions may not have wanted this to be true or may doubt it. You'll always have that. Everybody's not going to agree on everything all the time. But the preponderance of evidence, documentary, oral, physical, archaeological, you know, points to this being an actual, an actual case. And I'd like you, if this warrants more investigation, I'm for that. I'm for, you know, do more work. I'm not, I don't want to block anything like that. But I felt like this article wasn't saying, Hey, we need to look into it. It was just kind of matter of fact. No, it didn't. No, it didn't. It's, it was the wanderers, not the Clotilda, not saying, Hey, maybe we looked into Yeah. And as a scholar and historian, I think it's incumbent on colonial to bring his argument to the table, either. And he's been, you know, the people in Africa town would love to have him come address them. I think that would be great as there in Patterson said, you know, to feel the community. I think that would be valuable for him. But I think he needs to develop his arguments and present them in a formal scholarly way, footnote them so that others can evaluate them. And let's, let's have that discussion. But just to say, well, I don't, you know, you have to prove it. It was because you can't prove that it, you know, I just, I think it's incumbent on him to come with more and make his point. Absolutely. John, I want to say before we wrap up to people to check out the new issue of Mobile Bay magazine, you, an author of so many, many books, have decided to recommend other people's books to us, you know, with the spirit of your father here for summertime reading, days by the sea. These are some cool selections. Well, thank you very much. No, dad was a great, the article is called "My Father and the Sea." And it's just about dad's love of, he grew up in Mobile of the Bay and the ocean and the Gulf. And of course, his Marine Corps service made him intimately familiar with all weathers. He never suffered from sea sickness, which was a blessing. But he, he loved, you know, sea stories, maritime stories, sailing ship lore. And these were just some books and movies that, that we bonded over when I was a child. And things like Richard Henry Dana's, "Two Years Before the Mask," which was written in the 1840s. Marvelous book, "The Bounty Trilogy," about the mutiny on the bounty. And then of course, movies like "Captain Blood," and "Poratio Hornblower," the treasure island with Charlton Heston, the 1991 version. Just all those things really conjure for me, both his spirit and the sea itself. When I saw that, when I saw that come up with Mobile Bay Magazine, I started searching for pirates of the Spanish mane. I've heard, you know, so much discussion of the Spanish mane. I never knew there was a book of pirates of the Spanish mane. So it is like, that's on my to read list. So I am interested. The great book. Yeah, now it's a fun book. And I still have my copy. It's over 50 years old. And it's just great pictures, the illustrations on all powerful stuff. Good material, you know. Just to think about that, was he was such a reader. And he would tell you these stories, not in a pedantic way, but in anecdotal, for instance, I used the example of, you know, water spouts threatening a ship. And he knew about accounts where sailors would actually fire cannon into the water spout so that the cannonball would break the suction. And it wouldn't hit the ship. Wait a second, John, does that work? Fantastic. Well, it's a good question, because I got caught in a water spout last year on the Blakely River Bridge. And it was probably, you know, a fairly weak one as they often are, but it was still a very unplugged. And I thought if I had a 12 pounder cannon, that's right. Maybe I could work. But yeah, I mean, supposedly it did. It was, it was a method to interrupt and then make it fall apart. So when you, when you see this ledges driving to go see, you know, going to see grandkids or do whatever. And there's a 12 pounder on the vehicle, you know, it's just for the purpose of, of taking weather, decompressing. Nothing to see here. No, it's, it's all cool. It's mobile. Welcome to town, y'all. John, it's always a great pleasure to talk with you. And hopefully we get you back on sooner than later. Sean, I really always appreciate it so much. There he is. Hey, thank you. John Sledge. And go, of course, I talk about the number of books, the Mobile River, my favorite, but of course, it goes for Mexico, maritime history, books about the Civil War, books about living here, books about even, even gets me to look at architecture in a different way. Check out John Sledge's books. I'll put a link up on our social media as well. And we'll be right back. More of Midday Mobile. I'm Bill Riles, WKRG News 5. Barrel has made landfall in the US. Barrel is now a tropical storm after hitting Texas. Early this morning is a category one hurricane. Torrential rain from the storm quickly flooded streets in Houston. Storm surge rose to about seven feet in areas just west of Galveston. A disaster declaration has been issued for more than a hundred Texas counties. Single game tickets for four Crimson Tide home football games will go on sale beginning tomorrow. Tickets for the season opener against Western Kentucky will go on sale at nine tomorrow morning. Seats for matchups against South Florida, Missouri and Mercer will also go up for grabs. Tickets for Georgia, South Carolina and Auburn games are sold out. Baldwin County Sheriff Huey Hawes Mac is retiring after serving as sheriff for 17 years. In a letter to deputies, Sheriff Mac says he's accepted and offered to become the executive director of the Alabama Sheriff's Association in Montgomery. Sheriff Mac says he plans to leave Baldwin County sometime in late summer or early fall. I'm Bill Riles, WKRG News 5. You know you want one? A new e-bike. So come see me at Adventure Earth Bicycles for your new two-wheel freedom machine. Adventure Earth Bicycles in Midtown at the corner of Airborne Wellflower. Adventure Earth Bicycles, everything inside, to get you outside. Do you know a veteran or first responder who is struggling with addiction? Hope and healing are now within reach. VetsRecover located in Mobile, Alabama has a medically supervised detox and residential treatment facility for veterans, first responders and their families. Our medical professionals and peer support specialists guide you every step of the way. Take the first step. Call VetsRecover at 251-405-3677 or visit VetsRecover.org. VetsRecover transforming the culture of care. This is Midday Mobile with Sean Sullivan on FM Talk 106-5. Right on 128 to FM Talk 106-5 Midday Mobile. Of course we went over late in that segment. It's all right because it's John Sledge. Always a pleasure to get him on the show. And yeah, tomorrow coming up more discussion about what this author had said in the Wall Street Journal story about the Clotilda. We'll talk to Ben Rang about that and lots more because he's been busy. As always, my man's busy and doing cool projects. He lived in the life and you know with his association with the University of South Alabama, he's teaching the children too out there so that's good stuff. We'll talk with him more about that tomorrow. Coming right back more Midday Mobile will get your text and phone calls at 343-01-06 [Music]