He sunk the rebel rag, my boys, Hurrah for Robert Smalls!

Last month I gleefully reported that Jeff Davis Peak in Nevada, which hosts the last remaining glacier in that state, and in whose shadow we find the oldest single organism on Earth, was officially renamed Doso Doyabi, its original Shoshone name, by the U.S. Geological Survey.  Yay!

But Dr. Christine Johnson of the Nevada Historical Society, whom I’d been talking to about the renaming, reminded me that there was another part of this story:  Another proposal Nevada had received for a new name for Jeff Davis Peak was “Smalls Peak”, to be named after some guy I’d never heard of from the Civil War.  She told me that Robert Smalls deserves an honor like this in South Carolina, his home state, and that I should look into his story, so I promised her I would.

Well.

I can’t believe I’d never heard of him, and that sentiment is shared by his 2017 biographer, Cate Lineberry, to whom I’m indebted for a lot of my understanding of his story.

I was astounded to find that I’d never heard of this man.  I've done a lot of writing for the New York Times on the Civil War, I worked for Smithsonian Magazine and wrote about the Civil War for them, and I had never heard of him.

Like anyone else, Robert Smalls loved his family and feared losing them.  As a slave, he knew it could happen at any time, because no special consideration was given to keeping families together.  White people had convinced themselves that slaves didn’t have the same feelings they did, to make it easier on the conscience to treat them like cattle.  

Smalls’ owner, Henry McKee, of Beaufort, South Carolina, liked Robert and treated him with at least minimal respect, but he and his mother Lydia were still slaves.  They could serve in the McKee house, but they lived in the slave quarters and ate the scraps from the McKees’ meals.  McKee was unlikely to separate Smalls and his mother intentionally, but that would only last as long as McKee’s life and financial stability did.  This meant that there was no such thing as family security for Smalls, and that fear always followed him around.

When Smalls was 12, McKee sent him to work up in Charleston to earn some extra money for the household, because he was the kind of kid who could handle it.  Smalls first worked as a waiter, then a lamplighter (who cleaned the soot out of the city’s gas lamps), but then found his way to the docks, where he worked in all sorts of capacities, on and off ships.

When he was 17, he married an older woman named Hannah, to “keep [him] from running around”, and they had a girl, Elizabeth, when he was 19.  By the time he was 22, he was working as a deckhand.  He was highly skilled and quick-witted, and so it wasn’t long before he was promoted up to wheelman, the guy who steers the ship when the captain is doing other things.  His ship of employ was a big one, the 150-foot Planter:

This arrangement netted $16 a month.  The McKee household took $15 of that, and Smalls was allowed to keep just $1.  

Hannah and Elizabeth (and soon Robert Jr.) had a different owner, who could move them any time he saw fit, together or separately.  Smalls asked if he could buy them, and their owner did assent, but he set a price of $800.  A dollar a month simply wasn’t going to get that done.  Plus, if a slave bought other slaves, what would their legal status even be?  If McKee bought them on Smalls’ behalf, they’d still be subject to nearly the same uncertainty.

Smalls had to devise a way he could escape and take his family with him.  We all think like that sometimes, but this was urgent for Smalls, and he was dead serious.  But really, what was he going to do?  You couldn’t just run all the way to Pennsylvania with your wife and two little children.

A week after his 22nd birthday, there was, shall we say, a development at Charleston, and Smalls saw it up close:

The people of Charleston celebrated, but for slaves, it was unclear what this would mean.  After all, the Union never said it was going to free any slaves.  Would it even matter who won?  One thing it did mean was that a Union blockade was announced just one week later, and it most certainly included Charleston.  That meant that there would be Union ships just offshore, all the time.

Over the next year or so, Smalls and the rest of the Planter crew busied themselves with moving supplies and weapons around Charleston Harbor in support of the war effort.  Back and forth they’d go, passing all the forts and checkpoints, establishing standard routes and following all the proper protocols.  Smalls became very familiar with these.

The captain of the Planter, Charles J. Relyea, had some well-known mannerisms.  When he was in the pilothouse, he would fold his arms and wear a broad straw hat, which looked something like this:

One day, when Relyea wasn’t in the pilothouse, wheelman Smalls tried on that straw hat and folded his arms.  A couple of the crewmen got a big laugh out of it and told Smalls he looked just like the captain.  Smalls laughed too, until the last few things I just told you coalesced in his head.

Another of Relyea’s habits was to leave the enslaved crew onboard overnight while he and the other two white crew members (the first mate and engineer) left to be with their families or to attend social events.  That was a violation of General Orders No. 5, though:

Neither Relyea nor the Planter’s owner were military personnel, so they may not have been aware of this.  Smalls noted the predictability of their schedules.

Two months earlier the Union had codified the policy that military personnel could not provide any assistance in returning escaped slaves.  It would no longer abide by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.  In other words, if a slave reached Union-controlled territory, he was no longer a slave.  Robert Smalls knew exactly where those Union ships were.  Just a few miles away.

The first tremendous risk he would face was discussing his plan with the crew of the Planter.  If any one of them revealed the plot, intentionally or not, Smalls would surely be hanged.  Fortunately, the crew agreed, although two would drop out at the last minute.  Robert Smalls and one other crew member would bring their wives and children, who would need to hide on another boat the evening before the attempt.  Hannah was all in: “It is a risk, dear, but you and I and our little ones must be free.  I will go, for where you die, I will die.”  Two other women, Anna White and Lavinia Wilson, would be allowed to join.  They must have known Smalls and/or Hannah very well to be trusted with keeping the plot secret.

On the evening of May 12, 1862, just as Smalls expected, the white crew left the ship.  Smalls indicated to his crew that the time had come.  They would set out at the first hint of light the next morning.  It would still be dark enough to obscure Smalls’ skin color, but light enough not to arouse suspicion that the boat was leaving unusually early.  An added bonus was that the Planter happened to have aboard several cannons that it was to transport to Fort Sumter the next day.

Despite the short distance, there would be many risks along the way, of course.  If anyone ashore or in another boat suspected something was amiss, the Planter would be intercepted, and that meant certain death.  The single biggest risk was going past Fort Sumter.  It was the last major hurdle they’d need to get over, but they’d have to sail directly in front of it, in the line of fire of weapons that could blow them out of the water instantly. 

Why would they need to get so close?

The Planter’s route out of the harbor customarily was on the Fort Sumter side, and because there was a floating log boom across the harbor, you had to pass directly by Fort Sumter or Fort Moultrie. 

Some floating logs?  Couldn’t you just sail through that?  Well, the log boom probably looked something like this:

You’ll notice on the map, too, the very small numbers in the broad passage behind Fort Sumter.  Those are water depths in feet.  Good luck sailing a 150-foot ship through 1 foot of water.  If Smalls were less experienced, he might have attempted that and run aground.

On the morning of May 13, the crew set out, picked up the women and children at another wharf, and headed toward Fort Sumter.  They had to keep a normal speed, and that’s hard to do when everyone is scared out of their wits.  The crew would later say that Smalls was the only one who didn’t show any signs of panic.

When the big moment came, Smalls put on the hat, folded his arms, and gave the customary whistle code.  Two long and one short.  Smalls and company caught a little break here.  The sentinel at Fort Sumter didn’t know that the guard boat that usually patrolled the area was temporarily out of service.  He mistook the Planter for the guard boat, and, hearing the secret signal, never suspected a thing.  Smalls’ Relyea impersonation had gotten him past other checkpoints earlier, but it wouldn’t even matter here.  

Relyea knew by this time that the boat was gone, but he didn’t report it for a while.  He was too stunned and afraid to do anything.  How could he tell the ship’s owner or the Confederate army that he had neglected the ship overnight and allowed it to be stolen?  Relyea’s delay prevented word from getting up harbor in time.

In a few tense moments, Smalls and his crew and the women and children aboard slowly passed out of firing range of Fort Sumter.  Once they did, Smalls barked out the command for full speed.  It was noticed at Fort Sumter that the Planter was aberrantly headed out to sea, but at that point there was nothing meaningful the Confederates could do. 

The only danger left was getting the Union ships to understand that the Planter was not an ironclad ship intent on ramming and sinking them.  Smalls had to keep moving quickly yet somehow get this across.  His crew hoisted a makeshift surrender flag, and as the Union crew was scrambling to fire on this unexpected crack-of-dawn intruder, one of them called out that he could see a white flag.  The Union guns were ordered to stand down, and the Planter was commanded to pull alongside one of the ships.

Smalls and his crew immediately grasped what this meant for them and for the women and children aboard.  They had safely reached Union lines, and for the first time in their lives, they were free.

Over the elated cheers, whistling, and stomping of his fellow crew members, Smalls managed to call out to the captain of the Union ship, “Good morning, sir!  I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!”

I’ll say he did — these are the four “guns” he delivered to the Union (besides the Planter’s own armaments), according to the Charleston Mercury of May 14, 1862:

Robert Smalls immediately became a Union hero, for obvious reasons.  A few months after his escape, he met with Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and he helped convince them that the time had come to permit black regiments to be formed in the Union army.  Smalls was given the task of hand-delivering Stanton’s order to that effect to Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, who was essentially the governor of the Union-controlled Sea Islands, including Beaufort, S.C., where Smalls had been enslaved.

Saxton had been pleading for this opportunity to form black regiments, because he knew those guys were going to help the Union maintain control of the Sea Islands.  Saxton wrote to Stanton of his new troops after they saw their first action: “It is admitted upon all hands that the Negroes fought with a coolness and bravery that would have done credit to veteran soldiers. There was no excitement, no flinching, no attempt at cruelty when successful.  They seemed like men who were fighting to vindicate their manhood, and they did it well.”  

Smalls, because of his maritime skills, made his way back to piloting the Planter.  Once, while the Planter was shuttling supplies for the Union army in a Charleston harbor battle, it got caught in a crossfire, and its captain panicked and abandoned his post.  Smalls took control of the ship and guided it to safety.  Afterwards, the chief Quartermaster issued the following order to his chief assistant:

Sir:  You will please place Robert Smalls in charge of the United States transport Planter as captain.  He brought her out of Charleston Harbor more than a year ago, running under the guns of Sumter, Moultrie, and the other defenses of that stronghold.  He is an excellent pilot, of undoubted bravery, and in every respect worthy of that position.  This is due him as proper recognition of his heroism and services.  The present captain is a coward, though a white man.  Dismiss him, therefore, and give the steamer to this brave black Saxon.

With this order, Robert Smalls became the first black captain of a U.S. Army vessel.

His skills were needed by the Union, and he was paid accordingly.  In April 1864, when it was determined that the former Beaufort homeowners no longer had a claim to their properties, Smalls, with his accumulated earnings, placed a bid for the McKee house, behind which he’d been born and in which he had been enslaved.  He won the auction and took ownership of the McKee house, which would remain in his family until 1959.  (It’s a National Historic Landmark now.) 

One of the first things that Robert and Hannah did in their new house was to host the wedding of Miss Lavinia Wilson, who was aboard the Planter for the escape.  She married a soldier from General Saxton’s regiment, and he proudly attended the wedding.

In April 1865, the news came to now-Union-controlled Charleston that General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox.  One day later, a ceremony was held at Fort Sumter to raise the United States flag. 

Robert Smalls was in command of the Planter, and it hosted as many former slaves as it could fit to witness the ceremony from the water.  In his excitement, Smalls got as close as he could to the fort, and in the shallow water with his full vessel, this time he ran aground.  Despite the solemn nature of the day, I think Robert Smalls laughed at himself just a little bit.

He’d go on to serve five terms as a Congressman from South Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Captain Robert Smalls is buried in the Tabernacle Baptist Church Cemetery in his hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina.

On August 1, 1862, shortly after his daring escape, the Boston Evening Transcript printed a poem in honor of Robert Smalls.  It read, in part:

Hurrah for Robert Smalls, my boys,

Hurrah for Robert Smalls!

He broke secesh’s thrall, my boys.

And came without a call.

His bounty was the flag, my boys,

The flag that waves for all,

He sunk the rebel rag, my boys,

Hurrah for Robert Smalls!