- Robert Smalls, enslaved in Beaufort, South Carolina, commandeered the Confederate steamer Planter on May 12, 1862, freeing himself, his family, and the enslaved crew.
- His escape helped convince President Lincoln to approve the enlistment of Black troops; roughly 189,000 eventually served.
- Smalls later served five terms in the U.S. House and bought the Beaufort mansion where he had once been enslaved.
- Jim Clyburn’s book The First Eight hung Smalls’ portrait in the Capitol’s Lincoln Room in 2019 and now tells his full story in print.
I had just finished reading The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd when I went to hear Congressman Jim Clyburn of South Carolina talk about his book, The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation, at Baldwin & Co. in New Orleans. Both books are set in Charleston, where the Civil War began on April 12, 1861, with the attack on Fort Sumter.
Kidd’s book is historical fiction set in the early 1800s. It is told through the voices of one of the Grimke sisters and the enslaved child given to her as a handmaid on her eleventh birthday. The storytelling is vivid enough that a reader feels what it meant to be a rebellious feminist and abolitionist inside a slave-owning planter family. It also carries the reader into what it meant to be an enslaved girl, and then woman, willing to do anything to claim her humanity and her freedom.
So when I picked up Clyburn’s book, I already had a visceral feel for Charleston’s streets — the commerce, the fear, the cruelty, the waterfront, the market, the architecture. I realized with a shock that Robert Smalls, the first Black congressman Clyburn profiles from the Reconstruction era, probably knew of the Grimkes, who were real and important figures in that same city. Fiction bled seamlessly into history. I knew a little about the Grimke sisters already. I had never heard of Robert Smalls. After reading his story, I could not understand how his name is not celebrated everywhere — in books, in museums, in monuments. Clyburn has taken a scholarly and engaging step toward fixing that omission.
A Childhood Behind the Big House
Robert Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, in Beaufort, a coastal town seventy miles south of Charleston. He grew up with his mother, Lydia, in a shack behind the McKee mansion, home of the family that enslaved them. Henry McKee, who was likely Robert’s father, offered the family a measure of protection.
Like Sarah and her enslaved friend Handful in Kidd’s novel, Robert defied the racial norms of his time. He broke curfews and courted trouble. Lydia eventually persuaded Henry to send Robert to Charleston at age twelve so he would not grow too comfortable in that protection. He thrived there.
By 1775, South Carolina was the wealthiest of the original thirteen colonies, and Charleston was a hub of human trafficking. The state would become the only founding colony with a majority Black population.
Smalls found work as a waiter, then a lamplighter, then a stevedore loading ships on the docks. The owner of the Planter, a 147-foot steamship, taught him to pilot it. Every dollar Smalls earned went to McKee, who allowed him to keep just one dollar a month. Like the Grimkes in Kidd’s novel, McKee likely thought of himself as a benevolent slaveholder.
The Escape
By 1861, the Confederacy had pressed the Planter into service delivering supplies along the coast. Three white officers oversaw the enslaved crew, and when the ship docked in Charleston, those officers often went ashore to party through the night. Smalls hatched an escape plan for himself, his wife Hannah, their newborn, and the families of the enslaved crew. He warned everyone the plan could just as easily become a suicide mission.
On May 12, 1862, after the white crew left for the evening, Smalls took command of the ship, loaded with guns and ammunition, and sailed it past five Confederate watchtowers under cover of darkness. He carried himself with authority and sounded the correct signal on the horn. A sentry at Fort Sumter yelled, “Blow the damn Yankees to hell.” “Aye, aye,” Smalls answered, and sailed straight for the Union blockade.
Hannah had brought a white bedsheet to replace the Confederate flag. It flew as a sign of surrender as the Planter closed in on the Union line. The Union commander who boarded the stolen steamship was stunned to find its crew entirely enslaved men. “I thought this ship might be of some use to Uncle Abe,” Smalls declared.
Harper’s Weekly called the escape one of the war’s most daring adventures. It was more than that. Smalls had won freedom for himself, his family, and everyone aboard, and he had added momentum to the Union cause. According to the National Park Service, Smalls went on to pilot Union vessels for the rest of the war, using his intimate knowledge of Charleston’s waterways to help federal forces.
The Meeting That Changed the War
Smalls’ contribution did not end with the escape. Union officers recognized his ability and his heroism. Three months after he delivered the Planter to federal forces, Brigadier General Rufus Saxton sent the twenty-four-year-old to Washington to meet President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. His mission: convince them to enlist Black troops into the Union Army. It was a difficult assignment even for a war hero.
Smalls offered to recruit troops himself. Lincoln had doubts, but Smalls’ story and his personal plea won him over. Roughly 170,000 Black soldiers eventually joined the Union Army, and another 19,000 joined the Navy. In 1865, Lincoln acknowledged their contribution directly, saying the war against the South could not have been won without the help of Black freedmen.
Smalls remained at the helm of the Planter, fighting in at least seventeen skirmishes. In one harrowing encounter, Confederate troops recognized the stolen steamship as it carried rations to a Union camp and opened heavy fire, eager to reclaim the vessel and collect the $4,000 bounty the Confederacy had placed on Smalls. Spooked, the ship’s white captain ordered Smalls to beach the boat and surrender. “Not by a damned sight will I beach this boat,” Smalls answered. The captain abandoned his post and hid in the coal bunker. Smalls latched the door behind him and steered the ship to safety. When Union commanders learned what happened, they fired the captain and promoted Smalls in his place, according to the American Battlefield Trust.
Coming Home
By 1864, Smalls lived among free Black residents of Beaufort County, his childhood home. He purchased the McKee mansion at auction and moved in with his family and his mother, Lydia. After Henry McKee’s death in 1875, Smalls invited McKee’s widow, Jane, to live in her former house. He cared for her until she died in 1904.
Clyburn brought Smalls’ story back into modern memory during his years as House majority whip, when his suite of Capitol offices included the Lincoln Room — the space where the president reportedly sat by the fireplace telling stories and writing letters. Clyburn later hung a portrait of Smalls there, unveiled in a 2019 ceremony alongside Smalls biographer Dr. Andrew Billingsley. It was, as Clyburn describes it, a tribute to the South Carolinian who met with Lincoln more than a century earlier and helped change the course of the war.
When asked about his willingness to keep fighting against such long odds, Smalls once replied, “How can I expect to keep my freedom unless I fight for it?” It is a question worth asking ourselves today.
Related on Black Source Media:
Revolutionary History: Lost and Found and Lost Again
Repair the Breach NOLA: Year One in Review
Sources
Jim Clyburn, The First Eight: A Personal History of the Pioneering Black Congressmen Who Shaped a Nation (Little, Brown and Company, 2025)
Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings
National Park Service, Robert Smalls biography
American Battlefield Trust, Robert Smalls biography
About the Author
Orissa Arend is a mediator, psychotherapist, and journalist based in New Orleans. Her writing has appeared in The Louisiana Weekly, The New Orleans Tribune, and the Times-Picayune. She is the author of Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans.
[AWEBER SIGNUP FORM PLACEHOLDER]
