Between 1790 and 1825 Sea Island cotton’s popularity had soared.6 Also, in 1794 Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, making production of short-staple cotton (a hardy plant with short fibers) viable by speeding up the process of cleaning seeds from picked cotton.7 The boom in both types of cotton meant the South needed even more people to work the fields.
Although South Carolina had temporarily barred the importation of slaves in the 1780s because of an economic depression, the ban did not stop planters from smuggling thousands of black men, women, and children into the state.8
Despite the influx of enslaved people, planters needed still more to handle the work. By 1803 the planters succeeded in pressuring the state legislature to reopen the slave trade. Before the United States prohibited the importation of slaves in 1808, forty thousand more Africans had been brought into South Carolina to labor in the often sweltering fields.9
By the time Smalls was born in 1839, the Sea Island cotton boom, and the men and women who did the backbreaking work to support it, had brought vast wealth to the planters in Beaufort District, which included the town of Beaufort and the surrounding plantations. Despite the planters’ riches, the enslaved saw little to no improvement in the quality of their lives.
Rather than improving conditions for their slaves, many planters invested part of their profits in building stately mansions in town. These expansive homes sat on large lots shaded by orange trees and live oaks draped with Spanish moss and served in part to exhibit the planters’ wealth. The lots featured numerous outbuildings, including kitchens, carriage houses, and slave quarters, and were sometimes built with tabby, a type of concrete used in the coastal Southeast that was made from lime, sand, water, oyster shells, and ash.10
Some planters lived in their townhomes all year rather than on their plantations. Others lived in town only during the summers to avoid the outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever that plagued the plantations during the hottest months.11 Mosquitoes transmitted both diseases, though no one knew it at the time. While the planters fled to Beaufort, plantation slaves were forced to continue working the fields. A natural resistance to malaria saved many, but they were just as susceptible as whites to yellow fever if they had not already been exposed to it, and they were often its victims.12
One year-round resident of the town was Henry McKee. A twenty-seven-year-old cotton planter, McKee owned the dwelling on Prince Street and its slave quarters where Robert Smalls was born.13 McKee also was the owner of Lydia, who served as his house slave. And although he was a relatively kind master, he was nonetheless a master who had to be obeyed. As Lydia’s baby, Robert also became McKee’s property, just as all enslaved children belonged to the mother’s owner.
Henry McKee was Beaufort royalty. Born to John and Margaret McKee in 1811, he was the last of the couple’s eleven children, four of whom had died in childhood. His father, John, was the owner of Ashdale, a large Sea Island cotton plantation on nearby Lady’s Island, just across the Beaufort River. John had served as a young private during the Revolutionary War and had inherited property and ten slaves from his father before the war was over.14
John McKee was ambitious and good at business. By 1810, a year before Henry was born, Ashdale Plantation’s population had grown to ninety-five slaves.15 John McKee also owned property in town, where he and Margaret attended St. Helena’s Episcopal Church with their children. In 1814 Margaret helped to found the Beaufort Female Benevolent Society, which provided “for relief of distressed and destitute female children.”16 With their fortune and their philanthropy, the couple was considered among Beaufort’s leading citizens.
Henry spent most of his childhood in Beaufort, enjoying the life of a wealthy planter’s son, and, like other boys from rich families in town, his parents briefly sent him away to school. When he was sixteen, Henry attended the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy in Middletown, Connecticut, with about 240 other young cadets, mostly from the East Coast. At the strict military academy Henry studied everything from mathematics and natural philosophy to laws and politics for the next two years.17
When John died in 1834, his fortune passed to Henry, his only living son. With his inheritance Henry McKee, then about twenty-three, became a wealthy man. Even though the number of slaves his father owned had decreased over the years to sixty-one, perhaps because of a fall in cotton prices, Henry McKee was well positioned to continue his privileged life and became a good steward of his vast inheritance.
Just two years after he inherited his father’s estate, Henry married seventeen-year-old Jane Bold, the daughter of another wealthy Beaufort resident. The young couple soon had their first child, a girl named Eliza Jane, who was born only one month before Lydia gave birth to Robert.18
Lydia’s life stood in glaring contrast to McKee’s. Born into slavery on Ashdale Plantation in about 1796, Lydia was first owned by John.19 She had grown up in a small wooden cabin with dirt floors and a brick or tabby chimney. The cramped cabin probably was home to numerous family members, including her mother, and stood in line with other slave cabins.20
As a young child, Lydia was expected to do small chores such as gathering firewood and plants from the woods for cooking and was given meager clothing and food. Most field hands in the Sea Islands received two sets of clothing, one for winter and one for summer, while children usually got far less. Children and adults were given weekly rations of corn and occasionally some molasses and meat, depending on the dictates of the owner. It was barely enough to survive, but enslaved families could supplement the scanty rations by growing corn and sweet potatoes on small patches that they were allowed to tend, usually four to five acres per family, and by fishing. They used some of the corn they grew to feed the pigs and chickens they were permitted to keep in small numbers and often sold pork and eggs to their masters. With their small earnings, they were sometimes able to purchase additional clothing, coffee, sugar, and tobacco.21
Like other enslaved people, Lydia was forbidden to learn to read, but her mother taught her to speak Gullah, an English-based Creole language created by enslaved West Africans living in the Sea Islands. But Gullah is not just a language. The complex culture that developed in the Sea Islands is also referred to as Gullah. The word Gullah is thought to come from N’Gulla, the phonetic spelling of Angola.22 (In Georgia’s Sea Islands the term for the culture and language is Geechee.) Lydia grew up as both a Gullah speaker and a member of the Gullah community.23
The rich Gullah culture developed from the customs of the men and women who had been kidnapped from their homes in West and Central Africa beginning in the late 1600s. They belonged to various ethnicities, including the Bakongo people, as well as the Igbo, Ewe, Malinke, Mossi, Gola, Wolof, and Kissi, which meant they spoke different languages and practiced different traditions. When they arrived in the isolated Sea Islands and were forced to work the rice, indigo, and cotton fields together, they developed a common language and culture that preserved aspects of their former lives, including deep spiritual, musical, and storytelling traditions. Saturday evenings were usually a time for celebrating these traditions as enslaved men, women, and children socialized on the street outside their cabins, taking advantage of the brief respite.24
The Gullah traditions helped people maintain their identities and their connections as they performed the grueling year-round work required of them on the plantations. All the Sea Island cotton plantations had adopted the task system of labor, which gave each person a task for the day’s work based on the person’s age and abilities and the work needed at the time of year.25
Although the work was punishing and demeaning, enslaved people in the task system, like Lydia’s family, had some control over their time, and they used it to advantage. When they had finished their tasks, they cultivated their own crops, raised livestock, weaved and dyed cloth, made crafts, and fished and crabbed in the creeks and marshes. All these practices gave rise to an internal economy in which the enslaved men and women sold to and tr
aded with one another.26 Those forced to work in the gang system, usually on tobacco, sugar, and short-staple cotton plantations, labored until the overseer or driver decided they were finished, giving these enslaved workers no control at all.
Most of the plantations in the Sea Islands had between thirty and ninety slaves. The often-absentee owners usually relied on drivers, enslaved men who received additional privileges for their work, to manage the daily operations, from assigning tasks and doling out rations to meting out punishments determined by the master. On the largest plantations, including one on St. Helena’s Island that had 260 slaves, white overseers were in charge of the drivers.27 Though the treatment of enslaved people varied from plantation to plantation, it tended to be the harshest on these larger plantations. With overseers frequently coming and going, the climate of the plantation often changed for the better or for the worse.28
South Carolina’s slave code, which had been put in place in the eighteenth century, regulated many punishments. For instance, an enslaved man or woman caught without a pass could be punished by “whipping on the bare back, not exceeding twenty lashes.” If they assaulted or killed a white person or “set fire to, burn[ed] or destroy[ed] any sack of rice, corn or other grain,” their punishment would be death. The code remained largely unchanged until the end of the Civil War.29 But if an owner, overseer, or driver wanted to offer a harsher punishment than dictated, few whites, if any, would stop them.
Some owners, overseers, and drivers did not endeavor to make the lives of the enslaved more horrific than they already were, in part to avoid revolts and to keep the men and women healthy enough to work. Others were needlessly cruel and brutal. People were whipped excessively and put in stocks. Women were raped, and some slaves who had run away or were thought likely to flee were forced to wear iron collars that made escape much more difficult.30
Lydia probably was a victim of these abuses, witnessed them firsthand, or heard others talk about them. Even as a child she would have been acutely aware of the inequalities between enslaved people and those who controlled their lives.
In 1805, when Lydia was about nine years old, Henry’s parents, Margaret and John, visited Ashdale Plantation at Christmas.31 Plantation owners customarily provided their slaves with something extra during the holiday while also giving them three or four days off.32 That year Margaret brought oranges for the children, in addition to the usual gift of their annual allotment of clothes.33 While the other children hid from Margaret, Lydia approached her. Impressed by Lydia’s charm, intellect, or boldness, or perhaps all three, Margaret and John decided to take Lydia back to their home in Beaufort, about six miles away, to work as a house slave. The journey by carriage and ferry took about an hour, twice that on foot, but the young girl probably felt as if she were being taken to another country.34
Neither Lydia nor her mother had any say in the decision, and it devastated them both. Although Lydia would occasionally return to Ashdale on Sundays when she was given the day off, she would have little future contact with her family. The deep pain of being separated from her mother, one felt by many enslaved people, would never leave her. Lydia was essentially on her own at the age of nine.35
But Lydia was strong and resourceful, and she somehow managed to adapt to life in the Beaufort house. In addition to cooking and cleaning, she helped raise the McKee children. Her work was relentless and she had little privacy, but as a house servant she ate better food and was better dressed. Her position also allowed her to overhear family discussions, which kept her informed of what was happening outside of her small world.
Lydia was fifteen when Henry McKee was born in 1811.36 By then she had been taking care of the McKee children for years. The bond between white children and their black caretakers was often close, as young children had not yet learned their society’s prejudices, and Lydia and Henry must have been strongly attached. Henry may have spent more time with Lydia during his childhood than he did with his own mother, Margaret.
When Henry’s father, John, died in 1834, Lydia’s world changed completely, just as it had when the McKees had taken her from the plantation twenty-nine years before.37 Now thirty-eight, she was suddenly the property of the young man she had helped raise. A new master meant a new home too. She would remain in Beaufort, but when Henry moved into the house on Prince Street, Lydia moved into the slave quarters behind it to take care of the wealthy young man who would soon marry.
After five years of living in the Prince Street slave quarters, Lydia gave birth to Robert. She never named the boy’s father, but he was thought to have been a white man, possibly even Henry McKee. White masters often forced themselves sexually on their enslaved women. Lydia, however, had helped raise Henry, who was twenty-eight when Robert was born. If Henry focused sexual attention on a slave, it seems unlikely that he would have done this to a woman who had played such an important role in raising him.
The surname of Smalls may not offer any clues to his father’s identity. Robert probably chose it when he was older, a custom followed by many enslaved people. When he took the Planter in 1862, news accounts called him both Small and Smalls. When someone asked him about the surnames of enslaved people the following year, Smalls said that they often “choose a name for themselves” and that they would never mention that name in front of a master. Because whites often referred to slaves by their master’s last name, some chose their own surnames as a way to assert their identity and reject their owner’s claims on them.38
Regardless of how Smalls acquired his name or who his father was, Henry McKee seemed to favor and rely on him. As a young boy Robert cleaned Henry’s boots, carried logs for the fire, and brought water from the well. And Robert was frequently by Henry’s side, accompanying him on his trips to Ashdale.39
When he was not working, Robert played with the oldest of Henry’s children, although no one ever lost sight of the differences in their lives. While the McKee children learned to read and write, Robert tended to their father. While they slept in luxurious rooms in the main house, Robert slept near his mother in the simple slave quarters with only basic furniture and supplies. While the young McKees dressed in new clothes and were served the finest meals, Robert wore hand-me-downs and ate leftover food. Even so, as a house servant Robert belonged to a more privileged class of slaves and, like his mother, fared far better than the men and women living at Ashdale.40
In many ways Robert operated in two worlds, neither of which he truly fit. Lydia had taught her son to speak Gullah, which allowed him to converse freely with the men and women enslaved on the plantation. Yet he had never experienced the deprivation and hard labor that characterized their daily lives. He also could speak without a Gullah accent, which allowed him to communicate easily with members of the McKee household and other whites. But his austere life differed drastically from that of the McKees.
Despite the differences, Robert seemed to fare well in both places and carried out his duties as instructed. He was smart, capable, and well-liked by the McKee family. A McKee relative wrote in the late 1870s that Smalls “was raised in our family as a houseboy, always proved himself intelligent and of a kind disposition.”41
Although the McKee family was relatively kind to Robert, his mother was acutely aware that no matter how hard her son worked, his life was not his own. He was always at the mercy of his master and other whites.
To help prepare Robert for whatever his future held, Lydia took him to a slave auction at the arsenal in town and to the Beaufort jail to see a slave being whipped. Despite the horror of it, she wanted her young son to understand the lives filled with pain and suffering that most enslaved people endured and to see how fortunate he was.
After witnessing these brutal acts, Robert became angry and rebellious. As he tried to make sense of what he had seen, he broke Beaufort’s slave curfew, which was announced every evening by the ringing of a bell through town. Beaufort’s slave patrol caught Robert and took him either to the local jail or directly to Henry.4
2 Given Henry’s general treatment of Robert, it is unlikely he faced a severe punishment, but he was edging very close to danger.
During his years of enslavement, Robert Smalls saw much brutality on his own. Years later, when he was interviewed during the war, he said:
I have had no trouble with my owner but I have seen a good deal in travelling around on the plantations. I have seen stocks in which the people are confined from twenty-four to forty-eight hours. In whipping, a man is triced up to a tree and gets a hundred lashes from a raw hide. Sometimes a man is taken to a blacksmith’s shop, and an iron of sixty pounds weight is fastened to his feet, so that when it is taken off he cannot walk for days … I have heard of whipping a woman in the family way by making a hole in the ground for her stomach. My aunt was whipped so many a time until she has not the same skin she was born with.
He said these crimes were often “for the simplest thing if it was not done to suit the owner’s notion. They were whipped till the blood came and then washed down with salt and water.”43
* * *
In 1851, Henry sold his home on Prince Street and moved to nearby Bay Street to be next door to his in-laws. Twenty-one-year-old William DeTreville, the son of a prominent state senator, soon bought the elegant Prince Street property that included the slave quarters where Robert had been born.44
Perhaps Lydia had pleaded for a better life for her son or perhaps Henry realized Robert could make more money for him in a larger place. In any event, Henry decided to send twelve-year-old Robert to Charleston.45 The city was about seventy-five miles northeast of Beaufort and at least a two-day journey by carriage and a four- to six-hour trip by steamer.46 It also was vastly different from anything he had ever known.
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 4