Fearing for his family, Robert Smalls (1839–1915) led a daring, heroic escape from slavery during the Civil War. After the war, he became one of the South’s most influential Republican politicians during the Reconstruction era.
Smalls’s mother Lydia Polite was a slave on the estate of the McKee family in Beaufort, South Carolina, and gave birth to Smalls on April 5, 1839. The young slave grew up in the family household and didn’t work in the plantation fields. When he was 12, his owner sent him to work odd jobs in Charleston, including working at a hotel.
When he was 17, Smalls married Hannah Jones, a maid who worked at the same hotel. She was also a slave. The couple had two children and lived together away from their owners; however, most of what they earned was sent to their owners.
Escape by Boat
The Civil War had been going on for over a year, and Smalls had gained experience working on boats. In the fall of 1861, while working as a pilot on a Confederate ammunition ship called the Planter, Smalls devised an ingenious plan to escape to freedom with his family.While the ship’s captain and crew were on shore one night, Smalls put into action his planned escape for his family and the families of enslaved crew members. At around 3 a.m. of May 13, 1862, he fired up the boat and boarded his family and other slaves.
Smalls’s plan was to surrender the ship to Union forces, which had blockaded Charleston Harbor. His first challenge was evading four Confederate military posts. Smalls wore the ship captain’s hat and disguised himself well enough to sneak passed the final military base at Fort Sumter. At this point, Smalls had another task ahead of him: He had to surrender to the Union without getting killed as a Confederate.
Union Warrior
After the story broke, the North hailed Smalls as a hero. Smalls utilized his vast knowledge of the waters to aid the Union navy. For the war’s duration, he captained a Union ship in 17 battles.According Smalls’s great-great grandson, Michael Boulware Moore, who has spoken about Smalls on television and podcasts, Smalls’s efforts to free enslaved people did not end there. “He met with President Lincoln and Secretary of War Stanton and, among other things, convinced them to allow formerly enslaved men into the Union war effort,” Mr. Moore told The Epoch Times.
“We know that that added almost 200,000 men. And some historians suggest that without that added increase in capacity that the United States might not have prevailed in the Civil War.”
After the war ended, Smalls returned to Beaufort and used the money he made in the military to purchase his former slave owner’s home. He established a general store and let his former owner’s elderly, senile wife live in his home until she passed away.
Until his death in 1915, Smalls continued to fight for the civil rights movement. Smalls brought the Republican Party to South Carolina, and served in the South Carolina legislature and U.S. House of Representatives.
“He was elected to the South Carolina legislature in 1868. There, he wrote the legislation to create the public school system in South Carolina, which was the first free, compulsory statewide public school system in America,” Mr. Moore said. “So, in some ways, Robert Smalls is the father of public school education in this country.”
Robert Smalls would not allow anything to obstruct his path on the way to living as a free man. He not only freed himself and his family from slavery but did his part to ensure freedom and opportunity for all in the post-Civil War years.
