Captain Foster reached Mobile on a Sunday morning in August, 1859, his return from the Slave Coast being made in seventy days. Arrangements had long been made that a tug should lie in readiness to go at a moment’s notice down Mobile Bay to tow the _Clotilde_ and her cargo to safety. When the news came, the pilot of the tug was attending service at St. John’s Church. Captain Jim Meaher and James Dennison, a Negro slave, hurried to the church. The three hastened down to the wharf and were soon aboard the tug. They waited for darkness to approach the _Clotilde_. It was made fast and the trip up the bay was begun. _The last slave ship was at the end of its voyage._ The tug avoided the Mobile River channel, slipped behind the light house on Battery Gladden, into Spanish River. As the _Clotilde_ passed opposite Mobile the clock in the old Spanish tower struck eleven, and the watchman’s voice floated over the city and across the marshes: “Eleven o’clock and all is well.” The _Clotilde_ was taken directly to Twelve Mile Island, a lonely place. There waited the _R. B. Taney_, named for Chief Justice Taney of Dred Scott decision fame. Some say the _June_. Lights were smothered and in the darkness, quickly and quietly the captives were transferred to the steamboat and taken up the Alabama River to John Dabney’s plantation below Mount Vernon. They were landed the next day. At Twelve Mile Island, the crew of Northern sailors again mutinied. Captain Foster, with a six shooter in each hand, went among them, discharged them and ordered them to “hit the grit and never be seen in Southern waters again.” They were placed aboard the tug. Meaher bought tickets and saw that they be put on a train for the North. The _Clotilde_ was scuttled and fired. Captain Foster himself placed seven cords of light wood upon her. Her hull lay in the Marsh of Bayou Corne, and could be seen for many years. It is now below water. Foster afterwards regretted her destruction as she was worth more than the ten Africans given him by the Meahers as his booty. The Africans were kept at Dabney’s place for eleven days, being only allowed to talk in whispers, and constantly moved from place to place. At the end of the eleventh day, clothes were brought to them, and they were put on board the steamer _Commodore_ and carried to the Bend in Clark County where the Alabama and the Tombigbee rivers meet and where Burns Meaher had a plantation. On the Dabney plantation they had been left in the charge of the slave James Dennison who later married Kanko, one of their number, and became a resident of “African Town.” On the Burns Meaher place they were lodged each night under a wagon shed, and driven each morning before daybreak back into the swamp where they remained until dark.