Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, behind his owner’s city house in Beaufort, South Carolina. His mother served in the house but grew up in the fields, where, at the age of nine, she was taken from her own family. It is not clear who Smalls’ father was. It is believed that it was his owner, John McKee; his son Henry; or the plantation manager, Patrick Smalls. What is clear is that the McKee family favored Robert Smalls over the other slave children, so much so that his mother worried he would reach manhood without grasping the horrors of the institution into which he was born. To educate him, she arranged for him to be sent into the fields to work and watch slaves at “the whipping post.”

The result of this lesson led Robert Smalls to defiance and he frequently found himself in jail. To protect her son, his mother asked McKee to allow Smalls to go to Charleston to be rented out to work. Her wish was granted. By the time Smalls turned 19, he had tried his hand at a number of city jobs and was allowed to keep one dollar of his wages a week (his owner took the rest). But few knew Charleston harbor better than Robert Smalls.

Smalls soon met Hannah, a slave of the Kingman family working at a Charleston hotel. With their owners’ permission, the two were married, moved into an apartment together, and had two children. Well aware this was no guarantee of a permanent union, Smalls asked his wife’s owner if he could purchase his family outright; they agreed but at a steep price: $800. Smalls only had $100. Not knowing how long it would take him to raise the extra $700, he realized his “look-enough-alike,” Captain Rylea (captain of the C.S.S. Planter), gave him his best backup. While Smalls couldn’t afford to buy his family on shore, he knew he could win their freedom by sea — and so he told his wife to be ready for whenever opportunity dawned.

The Union Navy has set up a blockade around much of the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Inside it, the Confederates are defending Charleston, S.C., and its coastal waters, dense with island forts, including Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired exactly one year, one month, before. The C.S.S. Planter is a “first-class coastwise steamer” used locally for the cotton trade. After two weeks of supplying various island points, the Planter returns to the Charleston docks by nightfall. It is due to go out again the next morning and is heavily armed, including approximately 200 rounds of ammunition, a 32-pound pivot gun, a 24-pound howitzer and four other guns.

On the night of May 12, in between drop-offs, the three white officers on board (Captain C.J. Rylea, pilot Samuel H. Smith, and engineer Zerich Pitcher) make the fateful decision to disembark for the night, for a party and to visit family, leaving the crew’s slave members behind. Robert Smalls’ opportunity is now at hand. Once the officers are on shore, he confides his plan to the other slaves on board. Smalls and his men have no intention of being taken alive. Either they will escape or use whatever guns and ammunition they have to fight and, if necessary, sink their ship.

 At 2:00 a.m. on May 13, Smalls dons Capt. Rylea’s straw hat and orders the Planter’s skeleton crew to put up the boiler and hoist the South Carolina and Confederate flags as decoys. Easing out of the dock, they pause at the West Atlantic Wharf to pick up Smalls’ wife and children, along with four other women, three men and another child.

At 3:25 a.m., the Planter starts its mission. From the pilot house, Robert Smalls blows the ship’s whistle while passing Confederate Forts Johnson and Fort Sumter. Smalls not only knows all the right Navy signals to flash; he even folds his arms like Capt. Rylea, so that in the shadows of dawn, he passes convincingly for white.

“She was supposed to be the guard boat and allowed to pass without interruption,” Confederate Aide-de-Campe F.G. Ravenel explains defensively in a letter to his commander hours later. It is only when the Planter passes out of Rebel gun range that the alarm is sounded — the Planter is heading for the Union blockade. Approaching it, Smalls orders his crew to replace the Palmetto and Rebel flags with a white bed sheet his wife brought on board.

Lt. J. Frederick Nickels of the U.S.S. Onward orders his sailors to “open her ports.” As the Planter came near, Robert Smalls stepped forward and, taking off his hat, shouted “Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!” After boarding the steamer, hauling down the white flag, and hoisting the American flag, Lt. Nickels transfers the Planter to his commander, Capt. E.G. Parrott of the U.S.S. Augusta. Parrott then forwards it on to Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont with a letter describing Smalls as “very intelligent contraband.” Du Pont is similarly impressed, and the next day writes a letter to the Navy secretary in Washington, stating, “Robert, the intelligent slave and pilot of the boat, who performed this bold feet so skillfully, informed me of the capture of the Sumter gun, presuming it would be a matter of interest. He is superior to any who have come into our lines — intelligent as many of them have been.” While Du Pont sends the families to Beaufort, he takes care of the Planter’s crew personally.

In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its black passengers from slavery to freedom. Because of his bravery and his inability to purchase his wife, the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1862, passed a private bill authorizing the Navy to appraise the Planter and award Smalls and his crew half the proceeds for “rescuing her from the enemies of the Government.” Smalls received $1,500 personally, enough to purchase his former owner’s house in Beaufort off the tax rolls following the war.

After Robert Smalls’ escape, the Confederates put a $4,000 bounty on his head. In the North, Smalls was known as a hero and personally lobbied the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting black soldiers. Smalls was said to have recruited 5,000 soldiers by himself. In October 1862, he returned to the Planter as pilot as part of Admiral Du Pont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, where he assumed command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the coal-bunker. For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war.

Following the war, Robert Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave and is buried behind a bust at the Tabernacle Baptist Church. In the face of the rise of Jim Crow, Smalls stood firm as an unyielding advocate for the political rights of African Americans: “My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. It proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”