Robert Smalls Took a Confederate Ship and Sailed His Family to Freedom

Let me tell you about the greatest grand theft in the history of the United States Navy, and the thief was a twenty-three-year-old pilot who had never been to naval school, owned no ship and could not legally own himself. He stole an armed Confederate steamer from under the guns of Charleston, he did it with a straw hat, a borrowed jacket and a steady nerve, and he did it so that his wife and children would be free. Hollywood has passed on this story for decades, which tells you something about Hollywood's script department. The real thing beats anything they have written.

His name was Robert Smalls. If your child's history textbook does not mention him, find a better textbook. Because this is the kind of American story that conservatives ought to tell loudly: a man with nothing but skill, courage and a plan, who used his own talents to win his own freedom, and who then went on to serve his country and help write its laws.

A Pilot Without a Title

Robert Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, in Beaufort, South Carolina, into slavery. He grew up on the Sea Islands, and as a young man his owner hired him out in Charleston, as slaves in port cities often were, so he could earn money, a share of which went to the owner. Smalls worked on the docks and on the water. He learned the harbor, its channels, its shoals and its forts, until he knew it as well as any man on the coast.

By 1861 Smalls was working as a wheelman, effectively the pilot, on a steamer called the Planter, a wide, flat-bottomed side-wheel vessel that the Confederate military used as a transport and a dispatch boat around Charleston harbor. The Confederacy would not let a Black man hold the title of pilot, so the white officers held the title and Smalls did the work. This is an old story in any large organization: the man who runs the place has no business card.

That is a fact worth pausing on, because it explains the whole plan. A man who knows the harbor, who knows the signals and who knows the habits of the officers is a man who has been underestimated for years. Smalls had been watching, listening and waiting for the right night.

The Plan

The night came on May 12, 1862, a Monday. The Planter was tied up at the wharf in Charleston, tied up for the night. The white officers went ashore. Smalls had a crew of enslaved men aboard, and he had picked them with care. He explained the plan to them, and they agreed to it.

Before dawn on May 13, with steam up, he put on the captain's broad-brimmed straw hat and jacket, and he took the captain's posture. In the dark, at a distance, one man in a hat looks much like another. If Smalls had been more vain, he could have tried the sword.

I'd call that the best costume party in the history of the war. And I mean that with the highest respect for the man.

The Planter slipped away from the wharf. Her first stop was a wharf where the families were waiting. The women and children of the crew boarded the ship in the dark. Smalls's wife, Hannah, and their children were among them. In all, the enslaved crew and their families were aboard the Planter when it left the wharf.

Now think about what that cargo meant. It was not only a ship. It was their whole lives. If the plan failed, the penalty for the men would be death and for the families would be separation and sale. They had thought it through and decided that freedom was worth the risk. That is not the calculation of a victim. That is the calculation of a free man who has not yet been told he is one.

Past the Forts

The route out of Charleston harbor ran past a gauntlet of Confederate fortifications. The Planter had to pass the harbor's forts, among them Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island and Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the war had been fired thirteen months before. The sentries at each post would be watching for anything that looked wrong.

Here is where Smalls's knowledge paid off. He knew the signal that a Confederate vessel gave when it passed a fort: a particular pattern of the steam whistle, long and short blasts, that told the sentries the Planter was on authorized business. He gave it at each post. The sentries saw a familiar ship, a familiar silhouette and a familiar signal, and they let it pass.

The Planter steamed past Sumter, and the main danger was now behind them, though not all of it. Once the ship was beyond the range of the forts' guns, Smalls turned toward the Union blockading fleet, which was spread across the approach to the harbor. The Planter had to get close enough to the Union ships to be recognized before they opened fire. Smalls had a plan for that too: a white flag raised on the mast.

The first Union ship to see the Planter was the USS Onward, whose crew was preparing to fire when someone spotted the white flag. A boarding party found a Confederate steamer, guns and all, and a Black crew who wanted to turn it over to the United States Navy. Smalls reportedly told the officer he had brought some guns that might be of use to Uncle Sam. I say reportedly because the exact words are the kind of thing that grows in the retelling, and I would rather be honest about the limits of the record than serve a good line as though I had been standing there.

What the Navy Did With a Gift

The Union fleet could hardly believe it. Smalls handed over a ship with armaments and ammunition, plus the Confederate signal books and a trove of knowledge about the harbor defenses, including the placement of guns and, importantly, the fact that some forts were less heavily manned than the Union had thought. This was real intelligence, from a man who had spent years studying the harbor, delivered on a platter.

Congress took note. It passed a law awarding prize money to the crew of the Planter, in the same way the Navy rewarded the captors of an enemy vessel. Smalls's share was reported at $1,500, a large sum for a man who had been working for someone else's wages. The word "prize" is exactly right: the capture of an enemy ship was an honorable act in naval law, and the law treated it that way.

Smalls did not retire on his earnings. He kept serving. He served as a pilot for the Union Navy and Army in the waters around Charleston and Port Royal, and he took part in several engagements. In April 1863 he was aboard the ironclad Keokuk in the attack on Fort Sumter, and the ship was badly damaged and sank the next day. In December 1863, when the Planter was under fire and its white captain panicked and left his post, Smalls took command and brought the ship out. He was reportedly made captain of the Planter on the strength of it.

He also went to Washington in 1862, where he met with officials and, according to accounts, was part of the argument for allowing Black men to serve in the army. A year later, the 54th Massachusetts would show what they could do at Fort Wagner, and you can read that story in The 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner and the Soldiers Who Proved Doubters Wrong. Smalls had made the same case with a ship.

The Argument in Numbered Form

Since I promised you an argument and not just a story, here it is. What does Smalls's story prove?

1. Skill is not a matter of permission. The Confederacy's laws said a Black man could not be a pilot, and the Confederacy's own ships depended on one. A system that wastes talent to preserve a prejudice pays for it. This is the lesson of every artificial barrier, whether a slave code or a modern licensing law that keeps qualified people out of work.
2. Initiative is a moral quality. Smalls did not wait for a rescuer. He saw an opening, planned it, took the risk and delivered the result. We should note that at no point in the story did anyone give him anything. He earned his freedom with his own ingenuity, and the nation owed him no less for it.
3. The family is the point. He took the ship for his wife and children. Whatever your view of the politics of the war, the motive is as old as civilization: a man protecting his family and securing their future.
4. Freedom is not complete without participation. A man who has been freed and then left on the dock has been given half. Smalls went on to claim the other half.

Now the strongest objection, in a form a good point-by-point rebuttal would respect. Some say it is wrong to treat the story as an example of individual self-help, since Smalls was freed by a federal victory and by a Navy that took him in. That is partly true, and I do not want to deny the Navy's part. But the point is that the Navy's blockade gave him a place to go. It did not give him the plan. Without the plan, there would have been no ship, no sixteen people and no intelligence for the fleet. Individual courage and an institution willing to receive it worked together, as they do in every good story of freedom.

The Public Man

The story does not end with the Planter, and the second act is what makes Smalls a real model for citizens. After the war he went home to Beaufort. In a turn that every reader who likes justice will savor, he bought the house where he had been enslaved. It had belonged to his former owner's family, and it was sold, by the accounts, for unpaid taxes. He lived there for years.

He then went into public life. He lived through the first wave of freedom described in Reconstruction's Promise and the Freedmen Who Built Schools, Churches and Towns and took part in it. He was a delegate to the South Carolina constitutional convention of 1868, served in the state legislature and was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served several terms in the 1870s and 1880s. He supported public education and equal access to public life, and he was a regular, vocal critic of the efforts to push Black citizens out of political life as Reconstruction ended.

The record also has its complications, and I would be a poor guide if I left them out. In 1877 Smalls was convicted in a state court on a bribery charge. His supporters regarded the case as political payback by a Democratic establishment that wanted him out of office, and he was later pardoned. I will not tell you who was right about the facts, only that the trial happened and that people of good will have argued about it ever since. A profile that tells you only the glory is a press release.

He died in Beaufort in 1915. The house he bought in Beaufort is a National Historic Landmark today. The country, however slowly, has given him a place in the record.

What He Stood For

There is a temptation to turn every historical hero into a mascot for a modern argument, and I'd rather not. But there are a few things Smalls's life says to a conservative audience that it should hear on its own terms.

One is the dignity of work. Smalls was a pilot, and the pride in his craft carried him through the war and into politics. Another is the responsibility of the individual: he did not wait for permission or a program. A third is faith in institutions that earn it. He served the Union Navy, held public office under the Constitution and kept working inside the system, even when the system betrayed him, because he believed in the promise on the page. As to the promise, you can read the Declaration on the Constitution and founding documents page and the case for the Union's cause in What Caused the Civil War, Who Won It and Why, Answered From the Record.

The story pairs well with the others in the same family: the rescues of Harriet Tubman in Harriet Tubman Led Rescues, Spied for the Union and Raided the Combahee River, the Quakers who helped fugitives in The Underground Railroad and the Quakers Who Broke an Unjust Law in the Open and the later soldiers of The Harlem Hellfighters Spent 191 Days Under Fire and Came Home Heroes. Together they make up the part of American history that proves that the Declaration's promise was never just words on paper. People bled and risked everything to hold the country to it.

I'll leave you with the last joke, and it's on the Confederacy. They built an armed ship, assigned the most knowledgeable man in the harbor to run it and then trusted him because he had never given them a reason not to. It's the oldest mistake in the book, and it's the same one made by every institution that treats its workers as furniture. Never underestimate the man who knows how the place actually works.

The Case in Brief

1. On May 13, 1862 Robert Smalls, an enslaved pilot, took the Confederate steamer Planter out of Charleston harbor with the crew's families aboard, including his wife and children, and gave the ship to the Union Navy.
2. He did it with careful planning, knowledge of the harbor and the signals at each fort, and the nerve to pose as the captain in the dark.
3. Congress awarded prize money for the capture, and Smalls went on to pilot for the Union and to serve as a ship's captain in 1863.
4. After the war he bought his former owner's house, served in the South Carolina legislature and in Congress and defended Black citizens' rights, with a complicated record that honest history includes.
5. His story shows skill, initiative and family loyalty building freedom from the ground up, and it belongs in every American classroom.

What you can do: look up the Smalls story at your local library and read it aloud with a child, then ask your school board what it teaches about him.