Born in a cabin behind the house. At twenty-three he stole a Confederate warship out of Charleston at three in the morning — and lived to buy the house.
At three o'clock on the morning of 13 May 1862, a twenty-three-year-old enslaved wheelman put on his captain's coat and straw hat, walked the deck of the Confederate steamer Planter in the way his captain walked it, and cast off from a wharf beneath the headquarters of the Charleston district commander. The ship's three white officers had gone ashore for the night. Aboard were his crew and their families — his wife Hannah and their children among them — hidden below. Robert Smalls sounded the correct steam-whistle signal at every checkpoint and took the ship past five Confederate forts, Fort Sumter last of all, in the dark. Seven miles out he ran up a white bedsheet Hannah had brought and surrendered his ship to the United States Navy. "I've brought you some of the old United States guns, sir," he is said to have called up to the deck of the Onward.
He could not read or write. He had saved one hundred dollars toward the eight hundred it would have cost to buy his family out of slavery — a sum that might have taken him decades. Instead he took the whole ship, and the harbour's mine charts with it. Thirteen years later he was a member of the United States Congress.
Beaufort to Washington
The lifeline
1839
Born enslaved to Lydia Polite in a cabin behind 511 Prince Street, Beaufort
1862
Sails the Planter out of Charleston harbour and into freedom
1863
Takes the helm under fire at Folly Island Creek; made acting captain
1868
At the South Carolina convention, writes free schooling for every child
1875
Takes his seat in the U.S. House — the first of five Congresses
1915
Dies at 75 in the Beaufort house he was born behind
By the numbers
The measure of him
23
His age on the morning he took the ship out of Charleston
16
People — crew and their families — carried to freedom that night
$1,500
His share of the prize money Congress voted for the captured Planter
5
Congresses he served in: the 44th, 45th, 47th, 48th and 49th
What he did with it
The deeds
13 May 1862
The Planter. Past five forts on the correct signals, out to the blockade — with four heavy guns aboard and, more valuable still, his own knowledge of where the Confederates had laid their harbour mines.
August 1862
An army. He travelled to Washington to argue that Black men be allowed to fight. Secretary of War Stanton signed an order permitting up to 5,000 African Americans to enlist at Port Royal.
7 Apr 1863
The Keokuk. He piloted the ironclad in the attack on Fort Sumter. It took 96 hits and sank the next morning; Smalls and most of the crew got off.
1 Dec 1863
Folly Island Creek. Shelled from Secessionville, the white captain fled the pilothouse for the coal bunker. Smalls, knowing his Black crew would not be taken prisoner, refused to surrender, took the wheel and brought the ship out.
1868
Schools. As a delegate to South Carolina's constitutional convention he pressed for free, compulsory public schooling — the first such system in the United States.
1875–1887
Congress. Five terms from the Sea Islands, through the collapse of Reconstruction, defending Black soldiers' pay, Black voters, and the schools he had built.
Celebrated, then buried
Recognition
What it cost him
He could neither read nor write when the war began; he learned in nine months, in Philadelphia
The Navy would not rate him a pilot — he had not been to an academy — and he was likely a civilian all through the war
Told in a Philadelphia streetcar in 1864 to give up his seat to a white passenger, he walked off instead
In 1877, as Democrats retook the state, he was convicted of a bribe and later pardoned in a deal that also freed men accused of election fraud
He got a naval pension only in 1897, by special act of Congress: $30 a month
Today
511 Prince Street — the house he was born behind and bought at a wartime tax sale — is a National Historic Landmark
The Reconstruction Era National Historical Park, established at Beaufort in 2017, tells his story on the ground he walked
In 2023 the U.S. Navy renamed a cruiser USS Robert Smalls
His 1895 words are cut into the monument at Tabernacle Baptist Church, where he is buried
Gullah country, Lowcountry water
Beaufort, South Carolina
He was a Sea Islands man, raised in his mother's Gullah Beaufort, hired out to Charleston at twelve for sixteen dollars a week — of which he was allowed to keep one. The rivers and shoals he learned as a boy on the docks became, at twenty-three, the only map that mattered. He came home to Beaufort after the war, bought his former enslaver's house, moved his mother in, and later let the enslaver's elderly widow live out her days in the rooms she had once run.
7
Miles from the Charleston wharf to the Union blockade line
511
Prince Street — born behind it in 1839, died inside it in 1915
$1/week
What a hired-out boy of twelve was allowed to keep of his own wages
"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."
— Robert Smalls, 1895
