Captain Robert Smalls
(1839-1915),
sailor, businessman, and politician. Robert Smalls was born a slave in Beaufort,
a town on Port Royal Island off the coast of South Carolina. At the age of
twelve he was sent to Charleston to work as a laborer, starting in a hotel and
as a lamplighter but then becoming involved in the maritime industries as a longshoreman,
rigger, sailmaker, and wheelman. The latter job made him an expert in piloting
boats around the complex and sometimes dangerous waterways of Charleston
Harbor. This exposed the tension inherent in southern society: whites justified
slavery by stating that blacks were intellectually inferior, but their way of
life depended on black expertise in numerous areas. Like thousands of other
slaves in urban areas, Smalls was “hired out” to employers and allowed to keep
a tiny fraction of the earnings, and he saved this money with the intention of
purchasing the freedom of himself and his wife and child. These plans were
interrupted in 1860 when South Carolina and eight other southern states seceded
from the United States and formed the Confederacy. The Civil War began several
months later, and Charleston became one of the most heavily guarded cities in
the South due to its location and economic importance. Smalls was forced to
work as wheelman on the Confederate ship CSS Planter, a small vessel
with the task of delivering troops, supplies, and messages and of laying
explosives in the harbor to prevent the advance of the Union Navy only seven
miles away. While on the Planter, Smalls developed an elaborate plan to
flee Charleston with the ship and the other slaves who worked with him. Around
3:00am on 12 May 1862, while the white officers were asleep ashore, Smalls
piloted the ship away, picked up his family members and the relatives of the
other crew members at another dock, and sailed towards the Union ships. There
were five Confederate forts blocking his path, but he was able to trick them by
wearing the captain’s uniform and a hat like the captain’s, by copying the
captain’s mannerisms, and by giving the proper signals; the lack of sunlight
also concealed his racial identity. Once the Planter was beyond the
range of Confederate cannons, he took down the rebel flag and raised a white
sheet. A Union sailor later recalled “As she neared us, we looked in vain for
the face of a white man…one of the Colored men stepped forward, and taking off
his hat, shouted, ‘Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United
States guns, sir!’”
The Union Navy now had the ship, four
cannons, 200 pounds of ammunition, the captain’s book that contained
Confederate signals and a map of the explosives in the harbor, and Smalls’
expertise. He and his crew were awarded the prize money traditionally given to
people who captured an enemy ship in wartime, although they received far less
than what whites typically got in such situations. His actions were widely
publicized in the northern press and used by liberals as proof of black
intelligence and initiative; many historians believe, for instance, that this
helped encourage President Lincoln to finally support the enlistment of black
troops in the military. He went on speaking tours throughout the country and
became a civilian employee of the military, providing information about the
harbor and helping to organize former slaves on Port Royal Island into black
regiments. During a trip to Philadelphia he refused to give up his seat on a
streetcar to a white passenger, and the publicity from this event helped lead
to a statewide legal ban on segregation in public transportation. In 1863 he
returned to piloting and served as wheelman on five ships, including his former
ship, which was now called the USS Planter. He survived a total of
seventeen battles and engagements during the war, including one that caused his
ship to sink and another that caused the captain to flee. After he safely
steered the Planter to safety during the latter battle, the Navy promoted
him to its acting captain, making him the first African American to ever serve
at this rank. When Charleston was finally captured in the spring of 1865
shortly before the war ended, he took his ship there for the official raising
of the U.S. flag.
After the war Smalls became involved in
numerous efforts to help other former slaves. He transported food and supplies
on the Planter before settling again in Charleston, where he became
literate and purchased his former master’s home and another
building that was used as a schoolhouse for black children. He and other black
leaders in Charleston opened several businesses, including a general store, a
newspaper, and a horse-drawn railroad company. As one of the most prominent of
the country’s 180,000 black veterans, he also became involved in politics. The
former Confederate states were required to hold conventions to write new state
constitutions, and Smalls was one of the delegates selected for South
Carolina’s convention in 1868. As a result of this and other conventions
throughout the South, black men gained the right to vote and public schools
were created. From 1868 to 1874 Smalls served in the South Carolina legislature
as a member of the Republican Party, which was then far more liberal on civil
rights than the Democratic Party, and he helped pass laws that protected the
rights of African Americans. He served as a delegate to five of six
Republican National Conventions between 1872 and 1892, and he was also
appointed lieutenant-colonel of the South Carolina State Militia, the
equivalent of the National Guard, and was later promoted to major general.
In 1874 he was elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives, representing South Carolina’s 5th Congressional
District and later the 7th. No African Americans had served in
Congress before the Civil War, but between 1870 and 1901 twenty-two did. Unlike
Smalls, though, most of these men had been born free or gained their freedom
before the war, and nearly all were of light complexion; as a dark-skinned man who had freed himself during the war, Smalls’ background was more
similar to that of the majority of African Americans. While in Congress he
secured funding to improve the Port Royal harbor and introduced measures to
create economic opportunities for former slaves and to ban racial
discrimination in the military. His congressional career also came, though, and
a time when black rights were literally under attack. Terrorist organizations like
the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts murdered thousands of African Americans for
voting, running businesses, or otherwise asserting their rights, and the
federal government became increasingly reluctant to intervene. This led to depressed
turnout by black voters, which along with electoral fraud enabled white
Democrats to retake political office. In 1875 there were eight African
Americans in Congress, but by 1887 he was one of only remaining. He managed to
stay in office longer than others because his district was so overwhelmingly
black that even fraud and violence made it difficult for white Democrats to win
there. During the 1876 campaign, for instance, the Red Shirts overran a
Republican rally and threatened Smalls’ life, leading him to call election day “a
carnival of bloodshed and violence.” He narrowly won anyway, leading the
Democrats to attempt to remove him through false accusations bribery. During
the 1878 election, the violence became so widespread that one resident of his
district wrote “Political times are simply frightful. Men are shot at, hounded
down, trapped and held til certain meetings are over and intimidated in every
possible way,” and Smalls was defeated.
He retook his seat in 1880, by successfully
contesting the election results before Congress on the grounds that voters had
been frightened away, and he resumed his efforts to promote economic growth and
civil rights, introducing bills to secure debt relief for South Carolinians and
ban racial segregation in Washington D.C. restaurants. He chose not to run for
reelection in 1886, and in the decade after that two other black men held his
seat. They were nearly half of the five black congressmen in the country during
the 1890s, but after 1901 there were no more in the South until after the Civil
Rights Movement. During that decade southern states wrote new constitutions
which legally finished the disenfranchisement that had been started by fraud
and violence, and now even districts like Smalls’ would be led by white
Democrats. During South Carolina’s constitutional convention in 1895, Smalls
declared before the state legislature “My race needs no special defense, for
the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any
people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.” The
new constitution was ratified anyway. Smalls’ five terms in Congress made him
the longest-serving black congressman until the 1950s. During this same period,
Smalls was also stripped of his generalship in the state militia, denied a
military pension on the grounds that he had officially been a civilian
employee, and denied the rest of the prize money that was owed him for his
capture of the Planter; in 1897 Congress finally passed a special act
granting him a captain’s pension, and three years later he was given an
additional $3,500 in prize money to add to the original $1,500, although this
was far short of the estimated $60,000 that his supporters thought was merited.
With elected office no longer an option,
the only options still open to black politicians on the federal level were appointed
positions such as diplomat and port collector. Smalls served as Collector of
Customs for Beaufort from 1890 to 1893 and then from 1897 to 1913, although he
lost this job when the Democrats retook the White House in the latter year. Two
years later he died of diabetes and malaria, just at the time that the
migration of thousands of Africans Americans to northern cities was making it
possible for black politicians to again win election to Congress, although now
from northern states like Illinois and New York. During World War II the Navy
built Camp Robert Smalls as a segregated, all-black sub-facility of the Great
Lakes Naval Training Center north of Chicago; the camp thus honored his legacy
as a pioneer in the Navy but also contradicted it by imposing racial
segregation. A section of South Carolina Highway 170 is also named for him, and
in 2007 he became the first African American to have an Army vessel named for
him when the USAV Major General Robert Smalls was dedicated. At the dedication
ceremony his great-great-grandson stated, “Maj. Gen. Smalls was a renaissance
man – an educator, a politician, a soldier, a businessman and a family man, and
the Army could not have picked a better person to name this ship after.”
©David Brodnax, Sr.
