Captain Robert Smalls

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 5^th Congressional District and later the 7^th. 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.