Robert Smalls:
The Man Who Stole a Confederate Warship

Robert Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, in a small outbuilding behind the McKee house on Prince Street in Beaufort, South Carolina — the same house in which his mother Lydia was enslaved as a domestic servant. Growing up in proximity to the McKee family gave him something that would prove decisive: a close observation of how white authority was performed, and how it could be mimicked.

Around age 12, Henry McKee sent him to Charleston to hire out — enslaved people sent to work in the city, with enslavers keeping most of the wages.1 In Charleston, Smalls worked maritime jobs — rigger, sail maker, lamplighter on the docks — until he became a wheelman, the skilled harbor pilot who navigated vessels through Charleston's notoriously shallow and complex channels. He memorized every shoal, every sandbar, every current, every Confederate signal flag and checkpoint. He married Hannah Jones, an enslaved woman, in 1856. He tried to purchase his family's freedom; the price was set too high.

By 1861, Robert Smalls was among the most skilled harbor pilots in Charleston. He knew the harbor better than most of the white men who gave him orders. When the Confederate Navy requisitioned the CSS Planter as a dispatch and transport vessel, Smalls became its wheelman. The white officers trusted him with the ship because they had to — he was the one who knew how to move it. That trust was the opening he had been waiting for.

On the evening of May 12, 1862, the CSS Planter's white officers went ashore for the night — violating Confederate regulations but doing what they routinely did. They left the ship in the hands of its enslaved crew. Smalls had been planning this moment for months.

The Planter carried four Confederate cannons, a howitzer, and — far more valuable — Confederate signal codebooks and detailed charts of harbor mines and torpedo placements.2 Union Admiral Du Pont called it one of the most important captures of the war. Congress passed a special act awarding Smalls and his crew prize money — $1,500 for Smalls. He was the first formerly enslaved person awarded prize money by an act of Congress.

After the capture, Smalls became a celebrated figure in the North — front-page news in New York and Boston. He served as a Union naval pilot in 17 engagements.3

In summer 1862, Smalls traveled to Washington with a delegation of Black leaders and met with Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton to argue that Black men should be allowed to enlist in the Union Army. Lincoln had been resistant. Smalls argued that Black men were already fighting and dying — the question was only whether the government would acknowledge it. The United States Colored Troops were officially authorized in 1863.

In December 1863, under fire at the Battle of Folly Island Creek, the white captain of the Planter fled below decks in panic. Smalls took the wheel, held the ship steady, and brought it through. The Union Navy promoted him to captain of the USS Planter — the first Black captain of a U.S. military vessel.

After the war, Smalls returned to Beaufort, bought the McKee house — where he had been born enslaved — and entered politics. He served in the South Carolina state legislature beginning in 1868, where he was instrumental in writing South Carolina's Reconstruction constitution. He authored its public education article — a free, universal, integrated school system, one of the first in the South.3

He was elected to the U.S. House in 1874 and served five terms — fighting for Black voting rights, Black land ownership, and federal civil rights enforcement. He served on the House Committee on Military Affairs and advocated for desegregation of the U.S. Army. When political enemies fabricated bribery charges against him in the 1870s — part of the coordinated campaign to remove Black officeholders — he survived, was exonerated, and continued serving.

He served in Washington while a racial terror campaign dismantled the constituency that had elected him. The Hamburg Massacre of 1876, in which a white paramilitary group attacked a Black militia in Hamburg, S.C., was one of dozens of violent suppressions of Black political participation during Smalls' time in Congress.

In 1895, South Carolina held a constitutional convention to strip Black citizens of the right to vote. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses were written in — mechanisms that would disenfranchise Black voters across the South for the next seventy years. Smalls, serving as a delegate, rose to speak against it.

The convention passed its disfranchisement articles. Smalls lost.

During Reconstruction, Smalls had purchased the McKee house on Prince Street in Beaufort — the house where he had been born enslaved. After Reconstruction collapsed, Jane McKee, widow of his enslaver, became destitute. Smalls took her in and cared for her in her old age. She lived in the house with him until she died.

He held the post of Customs Collector of the Port of Beaufort until 1913, when the Wilson administration — which formally segregated the federal civil service — removed him. He was 74. He died on February 23, 1915, in the McKee house on Prince Street. The same house. He was 75.