In what was called one of the most daring feats of the Civil War, Robert Smalls seized the Confederate sidewheel steamer, the Planter (above, engraving), in 1862, and turned it over to the Union. U.S. Naval Historical Center
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For Tim and my parents
“Although born a slave I always felt that I was a man and ought to be free, and I would be free or die.”
—ROBERT SMALLS
Key Participants
The Planter’s Confederate officers:
Samuel Smith Hancock, first mate
Samuel Z. Pitcher, engineer
Charles Relyea, captain
* * *
Those who escaped aboard the Planter on May 13, 1862:
Abram Allston worked as a boatman at nearby Fort Moultrie and served as the wheelman during the escape.
Samuel Chisholm is thought to have worked on the steamer Etiwan, which hid members of the party before the escape.
Alfred Gourdine was a regular member of the crew and served as an engineer.
Abraham Jackson was a regular member of the crew and served as a deckhand.
William Morrison was a tinsmith and plumber by trade and served as a deckhand during the escape.
John Small was a regular member of the crew and served as an engineer. His wife and daughter were hidden aboard the Planter during the escape.
Robert Smalls, a regular member of the crew, masterminded the escape and served as the captain that morning. Also aboard were his wife, Hannah; his daughter, Elizabeth; his infant son, Robert, Jr.; and his stepdaughter, Clara.
Gabriel Turner was a regular member of the crew and served as a deckhand.
Anna White and Lavinia Wilson were likely girlfriends, relatives, or friends of others aboard the Planter.
* * *
Confederate Military and Political Figures:
President Jefferson Davis was inaugurated for a six-year term on February 22, 1862, after serving as the Confederacy’s provisional president.
John Ferguson was the owner of the Planter and leased the steamer to the Confederacy.
Gen. Robert E. Lee served as a military advisor to Davis until June 1862 when he replaced wounded Army of Northern Virginia commander Joseph E. Johnston.
Lt. Henry McKee was the master of Robert Smalls and his mother, Lydia Polite, and served in the 12th South Carolina Militia Regiment.
Maj. Gen. John C. Pemberton was the commander of the Confederate Department of South Carolina and Georgia and in charge of Charleston’s defenses. Pemberton replaced Gen. Robert E. Lee, under whom he had served.
Gen. Roswell Ripley was the commander of the Second Military District of Charleston under Pemberton. Ripley used the Planter as a transport and as his own personal dispatch boat for relaying military messages.
* * *
Union Military and Political Figures:
Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase was responsible for all abandoned Confederate property, which included thousands of formerly enslaved people as well as cotton left behind by whites when they fled the area. A staunch abolitionist, Chase saw the situation at Port Royal as an opportunity to help the former slaves and perhaps advance his political career.
Cmdre. Samuel Francis Du Pont was the commander of the South Atlantic Blockade and was responsible for Union naval forces during the attack on Port Royal Sound in November 1861. After Smalls escaped from Charleston, Du Pont hired Smalls as a civilian boat pilot working for the Union. Du Pont was promoted to rear admiral in July 1862.
Rev. Mansfield French, a Methodist minister, was sent to Port Royal by the New York–based American Missionary Association to see what could be done to help the former slaves. French convinced Du Pont to let Smalls accompany him to the North in 1862 to help him raise funds for the Port Royal Experiment.
Maj. Gen. David Hunter served twice as the commander of the Department of the South, which included South Carolina, Florida, and Georgia (March 21, 1862–September 5, 1862, and January 20, 1863–June 12, 1863). Though he was not authorized to do so, Hunter, an abolitionist, declared all enslaved people in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina free and organized a black regiment in 1862. Lincoln quickly rescinded Hunter’s proclamation.
Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton became the military governor of the Department of the South in April 1862 under Hunter, the major general in command. Saxton was responsible for the plantations and the former slaves in the department. A devoted abolitionist, Saxton asked Smalls and French to deliver a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in August 1862 asking for permission to enlist black soldiers.
Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman was in command of land forces during the attack on Port Royal Sound in November 1861. He was briefly tasked with taking care of the former slaves and the cotton left behind.
Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman led sixty thousand troops on a three-hundred-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah during his famous March to the Sea in late 1864.
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton authorized Saxton to enlist the first black soldiers in the U.S. Army.
Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles authorized Rear Adm. Samuel Francis Du Pont to have the Planter appraised and to determine how the prize money should be divided.
Prologue
On a mild May evening in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1862, the second year of the Civil War, vessels in the service of the Confederacy rocked at their moorings in the city’s harbor, ready to transport soldiers and supplies to fortifications in and around Charleston the following day.1 While many crews slept aboard their ships that night, Confederate soldiers patrolled for any signs of activity by Union spies or saboteurs. The soldiers had no clue that an extraordinary and unprecedented event was about to take place: by dawn a twenty-three-year-old illiterate enslaved man named Robert Smalls would seize a 147-foot sidewheel steamer from the headquarters of a Confederate general and run a gauntlet of fortifications to deliver the valuable vessel and its massive guns to nearby Union forces. In doing so, Smalls would win freedom from slavery, not only for himself and his crew but also for his wife and his two young children who were hidden on board.
Smalls’ act took the Confederates completely by surprise. Few in the Confederacy, or even in the North, would have believed an African American could captain a vessel, let alone pull off such a stunning escape. The news made headlines and challenged much of the country’s view of what blacks could do, while the white establishment of the South was so angry it offered a bounty of at least two thousand dollars for Smalls’ capture.2
While the South hoped for the chance to punish Smalls, Smalls suddenly became one of the most famous African Americans in the country. He was given astonishing opportunities, which he fully
embraced. Shortly after his escape, he met with President Abraham Lincoln and members of his cabinet in Washington, D.C., a city where slavery was still legal.3 He delivered orders from the secretary of war to a brigadier general that authorized the first regiment of black soldiers to serve in the U.S. Army. He was hired as a civilian pilot for Union ships and served in combat in numerous campaigns around Charleston.4 Because of his continued bravery, in late 1863 he was made the first black captain of an Army vessel.5 And in a particularly poignant moment the following year, Smalls bought the home in which he and his mother had once served as house slaves.6
But fame provided no protection from the prejudice and violence of the times. Smalls’ determination to secure a better life for himself, his family, and his country, however, sustained him, and he faced numerous challenges with dignity and courage, including being rejected from a Philadelphia streetcar because of his race.
Smalls also was known for his generosity, which extended to the white family that had once enslaved him. His kindness to them continued long after the war and included allowing the wife of his former master to stay in his home.7
Smalls’ status as a Union hero and a leader for the African American community, particularly in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, ultimately led to his election as a United States Congressman. Between 1875 and 1887, he served as a five-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina.
Although Smalls’ heroism has continued to inspire those who know his story, the general public has largely forgotten this exceptional man. Smalls deserves to be remembered and celebrated for his contributions throughout his life, but particularly for those he made during the Civil War when he risked everything for freedom. He was more than a Union hero; he was, and continues to be, an American hero.
CHAPTER 1
The Escape
Darkness still blanketed the city of Charleston in the early hours of May 13, 1862, as a light breeze carried the briny scent of marshes across its quiet harbor. Only the occasional ringing of a ship’s bell competed with the sounds of waves lapping against the wooden wharf where a Confederate sidewheel steamer named the Planter was moored. The wharf stood a few miles from Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War had been fired just a little more than a year before.
As thin wisps of smoke rose from the vessel’s smokestack high above the pilothouse, a twenty-three-year-old enslaved man named Robert Smalls stood on the deck. In the next few hours he and his young family would either find freedom from slavery or face certain death. Their future, he knew, now depended largely on his courage and the strength of his plan.1
Like so many enslaved people, Smalls was haunted by the idea that his family—his wife, Hannah; their four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth; and their infant son, Robert, Jr.—would be sold. It was a harsh reality for many in bondage. Slave owners often broke up families depending on their own needs and desires, and usually with no consideration for the bonds between husband and wife or parent and child. When his child married, a master might give a slave as a gift. He might take a mother away from her children to nurse his own or sell a man who had tried to run. When a master died, his slaves might be randomly distributed among his heirs or sold to different owners. And once separated, family members often never saw each other again.2
The only way Smalls could ensure that his family would stay together was to escape slavery. This truth had occupied his mind for years as he searched for a plan with some chance of succeeding. But escape was hard enough for a single man; to flee with a young family in tow was nearly impossible: enslaved families often did not live or work together, and an escape party that included children would slow the journey significantly and make discovery much more likely. Traveling with an infant was especially risky; a baby’s cry could alert the slave patrols. And the punishment if caught was severe; owners could legally have runaways whipped, shackled, or sold.3
Now Smalls’ chance at freedom had finally come. With a plan as dangerous as it was brilliant, he quietly alerted the other enslaved crew members on board. It was time to seize the Planter.
* * *
Charleston’s flickering gas lamps dimly illuminated the wooden vessel as the men took their assigned positions on the steamer. The Planter was 147 feet long, 30 feet wide, and featured two large enclosed paddle wheels at port and starboard.4 From the beginning of the war, the Confederates had used the ship as a transport, moving personnel, ordinance, and supplies between various locations in and around the harbor. The Planter was one of the newest and fastest coastal steamers operating in the area.5
That morning the steamer was moored in its customary spot at Charleston’s Southern Wharf, one of the many wharves that lined the Cooper River on the eastern side of Charleston’s peninsula.6 With twin piers, offices, and warehouses originally built to store cotton and rice, the wharf stood near where the convergence of the Cooper and Ashley rivers forms Charleston Harbor.
The wharf’s proximity to the harbor provided the Confederates with easy access to the numerous heavily armed fortifications built to protect the city from a Union attack. This location also made the wharf ideal for the headquarters of the fiery and outspoken Confederate general Roswell Ripley.7
Ripley, thirty-nine, was commander of the Second Military District of South Carolina. Although the portly, balding officer with a full beard held a high-ranking position within the Confederacy, he had been a Northerner for most of his life. Born in Ohio and raised in New York, he seems to have developed his allegiance to the South in 1852, when he married a wealthy Charleston widow from the prominent Middleton family and settled in the city.8
As commander of the district, Ripley was responsible for all military vessels in the harbor, including the Planter, and he used it not only as a transport but also as his own personal dispatch boat for relaying military messages. This meant that, if successful, Smalls would be seizing a Confederate general’s boat docked within feet of the general’s headquarters.
Smalls’ plan was to commandeer the Planter and deliver it to the imposing fleet of Union ships anchored outside Charleston Harbor. These vessels were part of the blockade of all major Southern ports Lincoln had initiated shortly after Fort Sumter fell in April 1861.9
As one of the largest ports in the Confederacy, Charleston was a lifeline for the South. A largely agrarian society, the South depended on imports of war materiel, food, medicine, manufactured goods, and other supplies. With the Union vessels blocking the harbor, daring blockade runners looking to make hefty profits smuggled these goods into Charleston and carried cotton and rice out of the city for sale in European markets. After supplies arrived in Charleston, the city’s railroad connections delivered them throughout the Confederate states.
Although crucial, blockading such an important harbor was a staggering task. The many navigable channels in and out of the harbor made stopping all traffic nearly impossible and had led Northerners to refer to Charleston as a “rat hole.” Although many vessels outran and outmaneuvered the blockade, the Union was able to intercept some and either capture or destroy them.
A few months earlier the Union had been so desperate to stop blockade runners that the Navy had tried to obstruct the entrance to the harbor by sinking an entire fleet of old whaling and merchant ships filled with New England granite. That plan had failed miserably. The ships, dubbed the “rat hole squadron” and the “stone fleet,” simply broke apart or sank farther into the sand, making a new channel. The blockade runners were back in business within days.10
It was fortunate for Smalls that the Union’s scheme had failed. Had it worked, the Union may have diverted the vessels at anchor outside the harbor to other ports, and reaching the Union ships was essential to Smalls’ plan.
Though the wharf and the Union fleet were only about ten miles apart, Smalls would have to pass several heavily armed Confederate fortifications in the harbor as well as multiple gun batteries along the shore without raising an alarm. The risk of discovery and cap
ture was high.
The Planter created so much smoke and noise that Smalls knew that steaming past the forts and batteries undetected would be impossible. The ship had to appear to be on a routine mission under the command of its three white officers who were responsible for the enslaved black crew and were always on board when it was underway. And Smalls had come up with an inspired way to do just that. Protected by the darkness of the hour, Smalls would impersonate the captain.
This relatively simple plan presented multiple dangers. First, the three white officers posed an obvious obstacle, and Smalls and his crew would have to find a way to deal with them. Second, they would have to avoid detection by the guards at the wharf as they seized the Planter. Then, since Smalls’ family and others involved in the escape would be hiding in another steamer farther up the Cooper River, Smalls and the remaining crew would have to backtrack away from the harbor’s entrance to pick them up. The Planter’s movement up the river and away from the harbor was likely to attract the attention of sentries posted among the wharves. If everyone made it on board, the party of sixteen men, women, and children would then have to steam through the heavily guarded harbor. If sentries at any of the fortifications or batteries realized something was amiss, they could easily destroy the Planter in seconds.
Once safely through the harbor, Smalls and company faced yet another big risk: approaching a Union ship, which would have to assume the Confederate steamer was hostile. Unless Smalls could quickly convince the Union crew that his party’s intentions were friendly, the Union ship would take defensive action and open fire, likely destroying the Planter and killing everyone on board.
Clearing any one of these obstacles would be a remarkable feat, but clearing all of them would be astounding. Despite the enormous risks, Smalls was ready to forge ahead for the sake of his family and their freedom.11
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 1