Robert Smalls and His Amazing Journey From Slave to Hero

Robert Smalls was born into slavery on April 5, 1839. His mother, Lydia Polite, was a house slave of Henry McKee in Beaufort, SC. His father is not known. Henry McKee sent Robert to Charleston, at the age of 12, probably to live with his sister-in-law Eliza Ancrum. In Charleston, Robert worked at multiple jobs as a waiter, lamplighter, stevedore, and on the docks. At age 17 he married Hannah Jones, a slave in her 30s, on Christmas Eve of 1856. Two years later they had a daughter Elizabeth Lydia and a son Robert Smalls Jr. in February of 1861.

That same year in June he joined the crew of the Planter. The Planter was a 147-foot side-wheel steamer owned by John Ferguson. At the start of the war Ferguson leased the ship to the Confederacy for $175 per day. It was operated from the pilot house and could navigate in as little as 4 feet of water. Smalls was the wheelman or pilot in the crew of 10. There were three white officers who were private contractors hired by Ferguson: Captain Charles J. Relyea; the first mate Samuel Smith Hancock; and the engineer Samuel Z. Pitcher. In addition to Smalls, six other slaves made up the rest of the crew. John Small (not related to Robert) and Alfred Gourdine were engineers. David Jones, Jack Gibbes, Gabriel Turner, and Abraham Jackson were deck hands.

Smalls desperately wanted to keep his family together. As slaves they could be sold off separately to whoever their owner chose. Hoping to avoid this Robert came up with an incredibly daring plan. He would commandeer the Planter and sail it out of Charleston harbor with his family and into Union hands, escaping to freedom. The ship generated a lot of smoke and noise so that it could not sneak by the forts guarding the harbor. Smalls would need to figure out how to deal with the white officers, avoid detection by the guards at the wharf, find a way to get the women and children on board, recruit a crew, steam through the harbor past the forts, and approach the Union flotilla outside the harbor without having them attack the unknown ship. In addition, the Planter was docked right next to the headquarters of Confederate Brigadier General Roswell Ripley, the commander of the Department of South Carolina and its coastal defenses and was his dispatch boat!

The white officers were required to remain on the ship at all times even when docked in the harbor but often they spent the night with their families in the city. Smalls recruited all the slaves in the crew as well as three others: Abram Allston, the brother of Jack Gibbes; William Morrison; and Samuel Chisholm. Smalls as the pilot knew how to operate the vessel and would impersonate the captain. The women and children would have to be picked up at a different location because the wharf where the boat was anchored was heavily guarded and their boarding the ship without leaving would be suspicious. When Smalls learned that Charleston would soon be placed under martial law and that the Confederate guard boat monitoring the harbor entrance was out of commission he would need to act soon. Shown below is a marker near where the Planter was docked.

At 3:00 AM on May 13, 1862, the crew began preparations to leave. Two of the members Jones and Gibbes backed out at the last minute. They fired up the boilers and raised the Confederate flag and the South Carolina state flag. Smalls acted as Captain Relyea and put on a straw hat, Allston was the wheel man. They set course for the North Atlantic dock a few blocks up the Cooper River where the women and children were hiding on another steamer the Etiwan. There would be a total of 16 people on the ship. In addition to the crew coming along would be Hannah and their two children, Clara Jones Hannah’s teenage daughter from a previous relationship, the wife and daughter of first engineer John Small, and two women Lavinia Wilson and Anna White.

The marker below is near the area of the North Atlantic dock.

The shoreline at the North Atlantic dock is shown below. From here Robert would need to navigate past the two forts shown in the picture- Castle Pinckney to the left of center in the middle, and Fort Sumter to the right of center in the middle.

The women and children were kept below deck. Also on board were four cannons (a 42-pound rifled gun, an 8-inch Columbiad, an 8-inch howitzer, a 32-pound rifled gun, a gun carriage and 200 pounds of ammunition) the crew had picked these up earlier in the day during the course of their work (they were relocating guns from locations at the mouth of the Stono River- Cole Island among others). They headed east past Fort Johnson, past a guard boat, and saluted a gunboat at anchor with a whistle. They needed to pass Fort Sumter by first light at 4:00 AM. At 4:15 AM as they passed the fort Smalls gave the customary two long and one short whistles, the signal to pass. Because the light was poor the crew at Fort Sumter thought the ship was the out of commission guard boat returning to duty. As they moved out of range of Fort Sumter’s guns instead of turning east to go past Morris Island they headed toward the Union vessels off the Charleston bar. Fort Sumter tried to signal Morris Island to fire on the ship but were too late. The crew took down the two southern flags and hoisted up a white bed sheet. The Planter approached the Union clipper ship the Onward. Captain Nickels called the ship to battle stations and was about to fire on the strange ship when the white flag was seen. What Robert Smalls could not have known was that two months prior Congress approved an article of war that prohibited military personnel from returning fugitive slaves. Robert Smalls had done it, he and his family had arrived safely. He was taken to Port Royal for an interview with Commodore Samuel Du Pont, the head of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, where he provided important information about the defenses of Charleston (the Confederates were evacuating forts at the mouth of the Stono River). Smalls would serve as the pilot of the Planter for the Union and would in November of 1863 be promoted to Captain of the ship. He would be the first Black Captain of an Army ship. The three Confederate white officers of the Planter would be court-martialed but their convictions would be reversed by commanding officer General John C. Pemberton. Smalls would become a celebrity in the press and would meet with President Lincoln and members of his cabinet in Washington, D.C.

Tragedy struck when Robert Jr. died of smallpox in May 1863. The Smalls third child Sarah was born on December 1, 1863. In January of 1864 Robert bought at auction the house at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort where he and his mother served as slaves. After the war he served five terms as a U.S. Congressman from 1875-1887. Robert served as U.S. Customs Collector for the Port of Beaufort, SC from 1889-1912. His first wife Hannah died in 1883. Seven years later Robert remarried Annie Wigg who died five years later. Together they had one child, a son William. Robert died at age 75 on February 23, 1915.

Markers concerning Robert Smalls in Charleston and Beaufort, SC are shown below.

Robert Smalls and the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868, Charleston, SC.