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  With this audacious act, Robert Smalls was exploiting a lifetime of trust and privilege placed in him by his white masters—first as a favored house servant, then as a semi-independent laborer and skilled sailor. Born on the South Carolina Sea Islands in April 1839, he was the son of Lydia, a slave woman, and either the Charleston merchant Moses Goldsmith or John McKee, who was Lydia's master. As a girl, Lydia lived and worked on a McKee plantation on Ladies Island, adjacent to the Sea Island town of Beaufort. Because of the dread fear of malaria, the wealthy planters of Beaufort visited their landholdings on the nearby islands only occasionally. One Christmas, when Mr. and Mrs. McKee toured the plantation, distributing oranges and other small gifts to the slaves, Lydia was precocious enough to compliment her mistress on the dress she was wearing. Mrs. McKee, charmed by the youngster's remark, asked her age. "I was born the year George Washington got president," Lydia replied. When John McKee next returned to the plantation, he asked after "the little girl who knew about George Washington," and took Lydia with him back to Beaufort to serve as a housemaid.

  Beaufort was the capital of Port Royal Island, which, with the nearby islands of Ladies and St. Helena's, held a prominent position in the lush coastal region Carolinians call the low country. With its endless bays, rivers, tidal estuaries, and broad wetlands, its vast open distances, swarms of shore birds and marsh cranes, and the ancient live oak trees whose "fingers" almost scraped the ground, it seemed a faraway, otherworldly place. In the seventeenth century it had become a rice-growing mecca after the planters selectively imported West African slaves who had knowledge of rice cultivation; these slaves introduced the complex methods of irrigation, seeding, and flood control that made the Carolina rice plantations profitable. By 1860, the South was exporting 182 million pounds of rice per year, two thirds of it from South Carolina, and the crop's success had helped make both Beaufort and Charleston prosperous towns, with grand white-columned mansions, high-steepled churches, and the Southeast's most cosmopolitan society.

  Robert Smalls grew up in the McKee household, childhood playmate to his master, Henry McKee, who was likely his half brother, while his mother, Lydia, served the McKee family. So comfortable was the arrangement that after several years Lydia began to worry that her bright, energetic son might come to difficulty in the town someday by failing to understand his true status. To forestall such a problem, she took the unusual step of forcing Robert to watch the slave auctions and whippings at the arsenal building on Beaufort's Craven Street, reminding him that only good fortune kept him from sharing the fate of the wretched people he saw there. Her strategy was not, however, entirely successful, for at age twelve Robert was caught defying the local slave curfew and soon after told his mother that he had listened with interest as another slave read a passage from a book by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—the kind of proscribed acts she feared could get him cast out of the McKees' Beaufort house to toil on the family's island plantations, or worse. South Carolina rice plantations by no means presented the worst work conditions. Because the owners relied greatly on African ingenuity, the slaves had managed to negotiate somewhat more favorable work conditions than prevailed elsewhere in the South. Rather than labor from sunup to sundown, they were expected each day to execute assigned tasks; once they had completed them, they were free to hunt, fish, or cultivate their own crops. Still, work in the fields was strenuous; slaves labored long hours in knee-deep water, and there was an ever-present danger of snakes, insects, and malaria—the very risks that kept the white planters on Beaufort's higher ground. Lydia wished to spare Robert from such a fate and finally appealed to the McKees to send her rambunctious son to Charleston, where the family maintained another home and where she believed Robert's insubordinate streak would be less apparent.

  In contrast to Beaufort, Charleston was a metropolis, a place of hubbub, splendor, and riches. Carriages with liveried servants traversed the palm-tree-lined boulevards and waited under the lamplights of impeccable mansions and hotels. Gentlemen strolled the Battery, talking politics and business, as ladies in crinoline window-shopped along fashionable King Street. Beyond the busy central market, with its fish stalls, vegetables, spices, and colorful rows of textiles, hundreds of large-masted ships lined the waterfront, taking on pallets of rice, tobacco, and other foreign-going cargo.

  CHARLESTON BATTERY DURING THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY

  The city ran on the energy of thousands of slaves like Robert Smalls, as well as a substantial community of free blacks, many of whom were small tradesmen or skilled artisans such as roofers or carpenters. Even free blacks, however, were made to wear identity tags and have a white "guardian," for the ongoing political agitation over slavery in the 1840s and 1850s had made local whites jittery. South Carolina, and Charleston in particular, had experienced at least two significant slave rebellions—the Stono Rebellion of 1739, which broke out only twenty miles from the city, and the aborted Denmark Vesey uprising of 1822. In the Stono disturbance, one hundred slaves trying to escape to Florida ravaged plantations and killed two dozen whites before encountering the militia, which slaughtered them and placed their severed heads on posts by the roadside. In response to the affair, the colonial legislature enacted the Negro Act of 1740, severely restricting slave behavior and mobility. The Vesey rebellion, planned for July 14, Bastille Day, 1822, was the brainchild of a fifty-five-year-old carpenter, Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had purchased his own freedom. Before Vesey could strike, however, two house slaves alerted the authorities, and he, along with several comrades, was arrested and put to death. The threat of slaves' being fired to revolt by conspiracies led by free Negroes remained very real in the minds of white Carolinians, perhaps because after 1820 blacks began to outnumber whites in the state, and free blacks, because of their greater worldliness, were believed to be more likely to stir the embers of discontent.

  Although slave-control measures were carefully observed in Charleston as secession and war loomed, Robert Smalls managed to win increased trust and freedom from his white family. He arranged with the McKees to hire himself out as a day laborer and later as a town lamplighter, paying fifteen dollars a month to his owner. In 1856, at age seventeen, he married a thirty-one-year-old slave named Hannah Jones, who worked as a hotel maid. From his modest earnings, Smalls began saving to buy his own and his wife's freedom, as well as that of their daughter, Elizabeth, who was born in 1858. His fortunes brightened considerably when he attained work in the town's maritime trades. From his boyhood in coastal Beaufort he was already familiar with boats and their operation, and he proved a quick study, learning the myriad channels, currents, and shoals of Charleston Harbor. John Simmons, a white rigger and sail maker who took a liking to the young man, mentored him in shipboard work and navigation, and by 1861 Smalls was the wheelman (blacks were not allowed to hold the title of pilot) aboard the Planter, a cotton-hauling steamer plying the rivers and inlets between Charleston and the Sea Islands. One hundred fifty feet in length and able to carry fourteen hundred bales, it was, because of its four-foot draft, ideal for maneuvering in the shallow coastal waterways. When war broke out, the boat was quickly commissioned by the Confederacy. Guns were installed on its foredeck and afterdeck, and it was immediately put to use ferrying troops, laying mines, and servicing the work crews building the harbor's fortifications.

  Smalls's travels at the helm of the Planter frequently brought him into the vicinity of his old home at Beaufort, although after fall 1861 no Confederate vessel could approach the place. On November 7, Union naval forces seeking a Southern anchorage for their blockade had bombarded and then invaded the Sea Islands, one of the first portions of the Confederacy to be conquered by federal troops. The South chose not to defend the outlying region, and local plantation owners fled the arriving Union forces, leaving behind their crops, stately homes, and as many as ten thousand slaves.

  The Union toehold on the Sea Islands was of great military value, but the area became another kind of beachhead the fo
llowing spring, with the arrival of two shiploads of Northern abolitionists. These missionaries, men and women from Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, perceived in the abandonment of the blacks of the coastal islands an unprecedented opportunity to demonstrate that, with the proper guidance, former slaves could exercise the virtues of citizenship and free labor. "The Port Royal Experiment," as it became known, was meant to prove the adaptability of free blacks, their eagerness to be educated, and their viability as wage laborers, so as to ease Northern concerns about emancipation. The endeavor proved more complex than anticipated. Though the departed slaveholders were not missed, their sudden exit was wrenching to the social hierarchy of the islands and raised difficult questions: how to restart the islands' agricultural economy, bring in crops, open schools, and decide whether the former slaves would own land or what civil rights they might enjoy. Indeed, events in the Sea Islands had raced well ahead of the formulation of the federal government's own policy toward slaves liberated from their masters by advancing Union armies: were the slaves to be regarded as other people's property or as free human beings?

  If federal authorities continued to wrestle with such matters, there was for Robert Smalls little confusion. It had been no secret to him, or most other slaves, that the victory of Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860, and the outbreak of war itself, held the definite potential for freedom. Looking out on clear evenings from the pilothouse of the Planter, Smalls could see the lights of Beaufort and marvel at the fact that his mother and other relations and friends there were already free.

  By spring 1862, with the federal lines so close, Smalls and the other slaves on the Planter began talking of crossing over, perhaps using the boat itself as a means of deliverance. Any slave caught plotting such an act, let alone carrying it out, would be killed, and Smalls understood that neither his connections to a good Southern family like the McKees nor his usefulness as a ship's pilot would save him. But he agreed with his mates to discuss the notion further and to watch for an opportunity to escape.

  They had several advantages. Smalls knew the placement of the Confederate batteries and the location of all the mines in Charleston Harbor—he had helped put them there—as well as the signals needed to pass by the harbor defenses. He later explained that the scheme for using the boat to escape was partly inspired by a casual remark made by one of his crew that, in height and build, he resembled the ship's white skipper. One afternoon when the whites were elsewhere, the crewman had playfully slapped Captain C. J. Relyea's distinctive straw hat onto Smalls's head and exclaimed, "Boy, you look jes like de captain."

  The Planter returned to Charleston on May 12 after having spent nearly a week moving guns from Cole's Island to James Island. Smalls suspected that since the boat had not berthed in Charleston for many nights, its white officers would likely choose to spend the night ashore, leaving him in charge. (This violated Confederate naval policy—at least one officer was required to remain with the ship at all times—but the rule was often disregarded.) In the afternoon a wagon carrying two hundred pounds of ammunition and four small pieces of artillery arrived at the wharf for transport to Fort Ripley, a newly built harbor fortification. Realizing this cargo would be a substantial prize for the Union forces, Smalls quietly ordered his men to take their time loading it onto the Planter, so that the delivery to Fort Ripley would be put off until the next day.

  Once the whites had departed, Smalls and his fellow conspirators made their final arrangements, then laid low until about 2 A.M., when he ordered the boilers fired. As a precaution, Smalls had told the crew that if a sentry came by, they should complain loudly and bitterly about the early morning departure and curse "the cap'n and his orders." A sentry on the wharf did hear the steamer come to life but later recalled he did not "think it necessary to stop her, presuming that she was but pursuing her usual business."

  Smalls had timed their departure so that his ability to impersonate Captain Relyea would work to maximum effect. If they tried to pass Fort Sumter in total darkness, he feared the sentry there might demand to speak with him to ascertain his identity; but Smalls surmised that in the half-light just before dawn, Relyea's profile, his naval jacket, trademark straw hat, and even his characteristic way of pacing the deck, which Smalls had learned to mimic, would suffice to allow the boat to pass without inspection. Having positioned himself in the pilothouse as the vessel reached Fort Sumter, he "stood so that the sentinel could not see my color" and nonchalantly gave the correct series of short blasts on the ship's steam whistle. After a pause that must have seemed an eternity, the sentinel replied, "Pass the Planter..."

  Once past Sumter, Smalls at first followed the set route for Confederate vessels departing the harbor, heading southeast in order to hug the coast along Fort Wagner. But he did not complete that final turn. Crying down to the engine room to cram the boilers "with pitch, tar, oil, anything to make a fire seven times heated," Smalls abruptly swung the Planter toward the open sea. Confederate signalers atop the shore batteries expressed concern, querying the Planter as to why it was heading the wrong way. Had they grasped Smalls's intentions, they might have succeeded in bringing the ship under fire, but with the Planter's furnaces roaring, the boat was in moments safely out of range. As the ocean waves crashed over the speeding bow, Smalls removed Relyea's hat and exulted to his companions, "We're all free niggers now!"

  They were in fact hardly out of danger. The Union boat crews manning the blockade had sprung to life as the Planter approached, worried that the unknown vessel might be a Confederate ram. Smalls, from his bridge, heard drums being beaten in a call to arms. He quickly ordered the Confederate flag hauled down and a white bed sheet hoisted in its stead.

  "Ahoy there," a voice from the Union ship Onward called out, "what steamer is that? State your business!"

  "The Planter, out of Charleston," Smalls replied. "Come to join the Union fleet."

  A very surprised Captain F. J. Nichols of the Onward was the first aboard the Confederate boat, where he was surrounded by Smalls and his band of exuberant runaways. Nichols later reported that he was told by "the very intelligent contraband who was in charge...'I thought the Planter might be of some use to Uncle Abe.'"

  The next day's notice in the Charleston Courier took a less cheery tone. "Our community was intensely agitated Tuesday morning by the intelligence that the steamer Planter ...had been taken possession by her colored crew, steamed up and boldly run out to the blockaders," the article read. "The news at first was not credited; and it was not until, by the aid of glasses, she was discovered, lying between two Federal frigates, that all doubt on the subject was dispelled." The paper, in its account of "this extraordinary occurrence," noted that one of the Negroes aboard the boat belonged to Mrs. McKee, and reported that it appeared from shore that the Yankees were already stripping the captured ship of its deck guns. This represented a hurtful loss at a time when the Confederacy was desperate for reliable ordnance, but to the federals, the acquisition of the Planter's guns was only a secondary gift. The greater prize was the boat itself, for the Union navy lacked vessels with a shallow draft, able to operate in the channels around the Sea Islands. Equally important, the United States had gained the services of Robert Smalls, whose knowledge of the local waters, as well as his intelligence about the positions of Confederate mines and gun emplacements, would be invaluable.

  Harper's Weekly and the New York Tribune were among many Northern periodicals to herald the theft of the Planter; Harper's ran an illustration of Smalls, terming his feat "one of the most daring and heroic adventures since the war commenced." The blow to the South's pride was commensurate, and its newspapers demanded harsh penalties for the white officers who had allowed slaves to steal a valuable boat. General Robert E. Lee wrote from Richmond that all precautions must be taken to ensure such an avoidable tragedy did not recur. (Captain Relyea and two of his officers were convicted of disobedience in the case but evaded punishment.)

  ROBERT SMALLS AND THE PLANTER
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  Smalls's daring act not only boosted Northern morale but also represented a decisive victory for his people. At a time when America's leaders could not agree on what to do with blacks freed from bondage by the war, and when even many abolitionists were uncertain about former slaves' potential as independent workers and citizens, the Planter's story made a compelling case for their native pluck and resourcefulness. "What a painful instance we have here of the Negro's inability to take care of himself," deadpanned the Providence Journal. "If Smalls had a suitable white overseer, he would never have done this foolish and thoughtless thing. Such fellows need a superior who is familiar with the intentions of divine providence and who could tell them where they were meant to stay."

  Smalls's action had an immediate effect on a debate then roiling Washington as to whether blacks emerging from slavery could serve as soldiers in the Union armies. Smalls himself was soon given the chance to advocate for their inclusion.

  From the war's beginning, a vocal element in the North had argued for emancipating the slaves in order to ground the nation's conflict in a moral cause, demoralize the South, and possibly create a new source of troops. But President Abraham Lincoln hesitated. To cast the fight as a war of emancipation, rather than one that solely aimed to reunite the Union, would, he feared, alienate the border states and push them into the Confederacy. "My paramount object in this struggle," Lincoln proclaimed, "is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would do that." It was thought by many, including Lincoln, that an emigration program to resettle the slaves would be required if four million blacks were suddenly to become free; until early 1863, the government even entertained the hope that the South, or parts thereof, might return to the Union voluntarily, perhaps with some program of gradual emancipation and compensation to slaveholders for their loss.