Robert Smalls:
He Stole a Confederate Warship

Robert Smalls is born enslaved in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839, the son of an enslaved woman named Lydia. As a child, he works in the household of his enslaver, Henry McKee. As a young man, he is hired out to work in Charleston — common practice that allowed enslavers to collect wages from their enslaved workers' labor. In Charleston, Smalls works on the docks, then on boats, and proves extraordinarily capable. He learns to navigate Charleston Harbor, one of the most complex in the South, and becomes a wheelman — the equivalent of a pilot, though Black men were not permitted the formal title.

By 1861, Smalls is the de facto pilot of the CSS Planter, a Confederate military transport and dispatch vessel. He knows the harbor's channels, the placement of Confederate forts, and — critically — the Confederate signal flags and recognition codes used to pass checkpoints. The white officers sleep aboard at night. The enslaved crew stays on the boat. Smalls begins to plan.

At approximately 3:00 a.m. on May 13, 1862, with the white officers of the CSS Planter ashore for the night, Robert Smalls and the eight-man enslaved crew cast off from the Confederate dock at Southern Wharf. Smalls wears the captain's large straw hat — standard issue for the white captain — and stands at the wheel. The plan: stop at another dock to pick up the families of the crew (including Smalls' wife, Hannah, and their two young children), then sail through five Confederate checkpoints guarding the harbor's exit to the open sea, where the Union blockade waits.

At each Confederate fort, Smalls gives the correct signal with the whistle. At Fort Sumter — the most heavily guarded checkpoint — he uses the captain's signal precisely. The Confederate sentries wave him through. At 4:00 a.m., the Planter passes the last Confederate fortification and raises a white flag of surrender to the Union blockade squadron. Smalls calls out to the Union sailors: "Good morning, sir! I've brought you some of the United States' guns, sir!"

He has delivered to the Union: the Planter itself (an armed Confederate military vessel), its cargo of artillery and ammunition, and — most valuably — Smalls' intimate knowledge of the entire Confederate fortification system in Charleston Harbor. He has freed himself, his family, and 16 others.

Smalls' escape is front-page news across the Union. He is brought to Washington, where he meets with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Lincoln. He makes a direct argument: the Union should enlist Black soldiers. His own act — commanding a military vessel under enemy fire and delivering it to the Union — is the living demonstration of what Black men could do in uniform. Lincoln and Stanton are persuaded. The decision to recruit Black soldiers into the Union Army and Navy follows.

Smalls is formally commissioned as a captain in the Union Navy, making him one of the highest-ranking Black officers in American military history up to that point. He pilots the Planter in service to the Union for the remainder of the war. In December 1863, he is at the wheel during a Confederate bombardment when the white captain deserts his post in panic. Smalls takes command, holds the crew together, and navigates the vessel to safety. He is formally rewarded for his valor.

After the war, Smalls returns to Beaufort — the town where he was born enslaved. In a detail that belongs in fiction: he purchases the house where he and his mother were enslaved, buying it at a tax sale. He later allows his former enslaver's widow, who has fallen into poverty, to live in the house until her death. He enters politics during Reconstruction, winning election to the South Carolina state legislature, then the state senate, then the U.S. House of Representatives. He serves five terms in Congress between 1875 and 1887.

In Congress, Smalls fights for civil rights, public education, and racial equality. He is a vocal opponent of the violence and voter suppression that is dismantling Reconstruction across the South. He speaks on the floor of Congress about the massacres being carried out against Black voters in his state. He is heard. Nothing changes.

After the Compromise of 1877 ends Reconstruction, federal troops withdraw from the South and white supremacist "Redeemer" governments take control. The tools that had given Black men like Smalls political power — the 14th and 15th Amendments, federal enforcement, Black voter majorities in coastal South Carolina — are dismantled one by one through violence, fraud, and the 1890 South Carolina constitution that effectively disenfranchises Black voters.

Smalls is removed from his congressional seat through a fraudulent election in 1886. He is offered a deal: charges he faces from a bribery accusation (which he maintains were fabricated) will be dropped if he drops his contest of the election result. He accepts. The man who stole a Confederate warship is stolen from Congress by a rigged ballot.

He spends his remaining years as Collector of the Port of Beaufort — a federal appointment he holds intermittently — and as a respected figure in the community where he was born enslaved. He dies in his own home in 1915, in the house he bought back. His story is almost completely absent from American history education. It contains, in a single life, the entire arc of Black political power in America: the seizure, the recognition, the exercise, and the extinguishment.