* * *
When Robert Smalls arrived in Charleston, he encountered a bustling port city that liked to flaunt its wealth and aristocratic traditions. The elite traveled the cobblestone and crushed-oyster-shell streets in private horse-drawn carriages driven by their slaves. On Sundays, they sat in boxed family pews at St. Michael’s Church. Musical gatherings, balls, teas, and dinner parties occupied much of their time, while visitors stayed in elegant hotels and browsed fashionable shops. In the early evening residents and newcomers promenaded along the Battery, a stone-and-concrete seawall at the southernmost tip of the peninsula.
From waterfront mansions along East Battery Street to Georgian townhouses on East Bay Street, the homes of Charleston’s wealthy reflected their owners and the fortunes many had made from the sweat of enslaved people. The properties contained slave quarters, kitchens, privies, stables, and other outbuildings, just as they did in Beaufort.
Elements of the city were beautiful, but the ugliness of slavery was always apparent. The entrances to some properties included iron gates with sharp spikes as protection against potential slave revolts. Naked men, women, and children were sold in open slave markets near the Old Exchange Building as potential buyers evaluated them as if they were livestock.47 The younger, stronger slaves and those with special skills, including ironwork or carpentry, commanded the highest prices. Enslaved women cursed with beauty also brought higher prices. (By 1856 city leaders required slaves to be sold only in enclosed spaces to prevent crowds from interfering with traffic. Private slave marts immediately replaced the open markets and helped prevent negative publicity as the national debate about slavery intensified.)48
Like Beaufort, Charleston was a city wedded to the institution of slavery. It counted 19,500 enslaved men, women, and children among its 43,000 residents in 1850, the year before Robert arrived in the city, and had long been a center for the slave trade, importing and distributing human beings for profit.49
Of all the enslaved Africans who came to North America through the trans-Atlantic slave trade before it became illegal in 1808, approximately 40 percent had arrived through Charleston Harbor. Those who survived the horrific conditions of the Middle Passage were quarantined before they were allowed into the city, kept either aboard the ship that had brought them or taken to nearby Sullivan’s Island. Those taken to the island remained for weeks in pesthouses, the term for the wooden shacks that housed those infected or believed infected with a pestilential or contagious disease. Once deemed healthy, they were taken to the city and either held in confinement until they were sold or delivered to the new owners who had ordered them.50
By the time Robert arrived in Charleston in 1851, importing slaves had been illegal for decades, but the buying and selling of enslaved people already in the country remained a brisk market.
Some were sold to owners in the city while others were purchased to work in the fields. The men, women, and children whose owners kept them in Charleston often had advantages not afforded to those isolated on plantations. They could become involved in various trades, attend church, and belong to charitable organizations, all of which exposed them to information and ideas. Although learning to read and write was illegal, some urban slaves secretly did, and some had opportunities to travel as part of their responsibilities. The majority worked as domestics or unskilled laborers, but others worked as tailors, blacksmiths, bricklayers, coopers, shoemakers, bakers, and in various other jobs that required particular skills. On the waterfront black men worked as dockhands, stevedores, and sailors.51
The treatment these people received from their masters varied as much as their masters’ personalities, and the examples of cruelty were legion. If the owners did not wish to punish their slaves themselves, they could, for a fee, bring them to Charleston’s notorious Work House, where they faced unfathomable brutality in the former sugar warehouse that Charlestonians had dubbed the Sugar House. To instill fear masters frequently threatened to send slaves “for a little sugar.”52
The famous abolitionist Angelina Grimké, the daughter of Charleston slaveholders, wrote in 1839 of one girl who was stripped and whipped at the Work House: “Large pieces of flesh had actually been cut out by the torturing lash.” Another female slave, Grimké wrote, was forced to walk the treadmill that provided power for grinding corn at the Work House. As with all enslaved people sentenced to this form of torture, her hands were tied above her head and her feet to a plank. If a slave tripped or fell, she could easily lose a foot or leg between the rollers of the treadmill. “For ten days or two weeks after her return,” Grimké wrote, “she was lame, from the violent exertion necessary to enable her to keep the step on the machine.”53
Slaves were also subject to numerous rules, including a nightly curfew like the one in Beaufort. Every evening at ten minutes before nine o’clock—ten o’clock in the summer—a drummer stood before each of the numerous police stations scattered throughout the city and beat a warning to announce that the curfew was about to begin. Just before the bells of St. Michael’s tolled a few minutes later, the drummer beat one last warning. Slaves caught outside after that last beat were sent to the Work House, where they were disciplined, or to the jail to await their owners. After paying the fines, those masters most certainly handed out their own punishments.
Though Robert Smalls, at just twelve years old, had already witnessed terrible abuses on the plantations around Beaufort, he must have found the scale of Charleston’s slavery shocking and terrifying. Yet there was no one he could turn to for comfort.
In Charleston it is likely that Robert lived in the slave quarters at the house of Eliza Ancrum, Henry McKee’s sister-in-law. Although Robert may have received guidance from the Ancrums’ other slaves, he was hired out for work and largely left to fend for himself. Hiring out slaves was common in Charleston. The city even employed hired-out slaves as firefighters. Some masters found the jobs and made the arrangements. Others allowed the enslaved to handle the transactions themselves, although this practice was controversial and had been outlawed at various times since the eighteenth century. However the arrangements were made, those who were hired out had far greater freedom than if they worked on a plantation or in a master’s home. Some whites worried that these people had too much freedom.
Robert found work outside the Ancrum home shortly after he arrived and soon learned of a law unique to the city of Charleston. It required slaves who were hired out to wear a diamond-shaped and numbered metal badge. The badge functioned as an annual license and identified the type of work the enslaved were doing.54 The law helped differentiate the slaves from the city’s free blacks, who had been part of Charleston’s population since the seventeenth century.
By 1850 Charleston had about thirty-four hundred free blacks. A few of the wealthiest also owned slaves and treated them as such. Others purchased family members in an effort to liberate them from their masters, given that granting absolute freedom was not possible. South Carolina law allowed only the legislature to free slaves.55 After 1820 only an act of the South Carolina legislature could free an enslaved person.
Wearing the metal badge, Robert first worked as a waiter at the Planter’s Hotel.56 The largest and most luxurious hotel in Charleston at the time had been built on Queen Street in 1803 on the site of the Dock Street Theatre, the first building in America built exclusively for theatrical performances. Its wrought-iron balcony and sandstone columns welcomed the wealthy planters who flocked to the hotel, especially during Charleston’s winter social season, which ended with a boisterous week of horse racing. The job would have been challenging for anyone, especially a twelve-year-old, but it gave Robert experience and exposed him to a larger world.
Gifted with determination and ambition, Robert did not stay at this job long. He next took a position as one of Charleston’s lamplighters. In 1851 gas lamps were still relatively new to the city. The Charleston Gas Light Company had opened just five years earlier, and now its glass globes lit the city’s thoroug
hfares.57 Robert’s job was to clean the globes and remove soot from the jets in the morning and light the lamps in the evening. This was another difficult position, but it provided him with far more independence than waiting tables at the Planter’s Hotel and it meant he no longer had to keep demanding patrons happy. He seemed able to connect with people, as he had with Henry McKee, and perhaps this charm had helped him find another position so quickly.
By the time Robert was a teenager, Charleston’s docks were calling to him. Because he had grown up in Beaufort, he was comfortable around the water and seemed drawn to it. With Henry’s permission Robert began working as a stevedore, loading and unloading cargo from various ships on the Charleston waterfront. The docks teemed with a mix of free blacks, enslaved blacks, and white immigrants, mostly Irish, exposing Robert once again to new people, ideas, and opportunities.58
He soon secured a new job, driving the hoisting horses that helped load and unload vessels. His employer was a white man named John Simmons.59 Simmons, who worked as a rigger, clearly valued Robert’s work ethic and was fond of him. After a year Simmons had Robert working in the rigging loft. In the winter Simmons taught the teen how to make rope lines and sails, and in the summer he hired Robert as a sailor on a local schooner.
While Robert was gaining new skills that he would use for years to come, he was also increasing his pay and creating a life for himself. At seventeen he married Hannah Jones, an enslaved woman in her thirties whose master hired her out as a washerwoman and maid. Robert was dedicated to Hannah, but he seems to have had a practical approach to marriage. He once said, “My idea was to have a wife to prevent me from running around—to have somebody to do for me and to keep me.”60
Hannah’s owner, Samuel Kingman, worked for Planters and Mechanics Bank in Charleston. He had purchased Hannah and her three children, Charlotte, Clara, and an infant boy named Bostick, in November 1846, paying $850 for all four souls.61 Bostick’s fate, however, remains unknown. Perhaps he died from disease when still a young child, as so many children did at the time.
Slaves could not marry legally, but owners could grant permission for an unofficial service, and doing so was often in their best interest. Granting permission to marry helped the morale of their slaves and eventually added to an owner’s wealth since any children of enslaved women became the master’s property. Men with families were also less inclined to run away.
Because Robert was reliable and trusted, Henry gave him permission to wed. After Robert and Hannah also gained Kingman’s consent by agreeing to pay him $5 per month, they were married on Christmas Eve in 1856. Christmas was a popular time for enslaved people to marry, as work schedules were often relaxed, slaves were allowed to travel to visit family, and owners were frequently away. The ceremony took place at Henry’s home in Beaufort and was likely attended by Robert’s mother, Lydia, who still worked for the McKee family in Beaufort and remained a central figure in her son’s life.62
Christmas was also a popular time to try to escape. Two years earlier Harriet Tubman had helped three of her brothers, who were about to be sold, flee from Maryland on Christmas Day. Their owner had been delayed in his travels, which provided her the time to get them out. William and Ellen Craft had also made their daring escape in 1848 from Georgia at Christmas. The light-skinned Ellen disguised herself as a young cotton planter, and her husband posed as her servant. The two managed to travel first class during their nerve-wracking four-day journey to Philadelphia.63
After they married, Robert and Hannah Smalls returned to their tasks in Charleston and tried to build a life together despite their lack of freedom. Two years later Elizabeth Lydia was born. Her middle name honored Robert’s mother.64
With the birth of his daughter, nineteen-year-old Robert Smalls grew even more concerned that his family might be separated, and he became desperate for a way to protect them. He boldly asked Kingman to allow him to buy his wife and daughter. Kingman agreed, though the specifics of their arrangement which would allow them to circumvent South Carolina law are not known. Kingman required the high price of $800 for the purchase of Hannah and Elizabeth, while Smalls would remain the property of McKee.
It was difficult but not impossible for slaves in Charleston to accumulate money. It largely depended on whether their owners allowed them to hire themselves out to others and keep any of the money they earned. Henry did allow Robert to keep a small portion of what he made each month, but saving $800 would take years.
To supplement his small income, Robert likely bought and sold items on the waterfront, and Hannah laundered sailors’ shirts. With each passing month their savings and hopes grew. But even if Robert had managed to secure the entire amount and buy his family’s freedom, he would remain enslaved. Still, he would do whatever he could to protect his wife and children.65
CHAPTER 3
In the Service of the Confederacy
In the late 1850s, as Charleston bustled with business from the cotton and rice trade, and African American men, women, and children were routinely put up for auction, Robert Smalls and Hannah continued to work long hours to secure more money. They hoped to save enough to one day meet Kingman’s demand. Each month they were reminded of what could happen to them as the couple saw other enslaved people sold and their respective families torn apart.
Smalls knew that if he came back from the wharf one day and learned that Hannah or Elizabeth had been taken from him, he would find their loss unbearable. His own mother had been taken from her family when she was about nine years old, and Smalls had been sent to Charleston on his own at twelve. Those separations had been heart-wrenching, but losing his daughter would be even more agonizing. And while Kingman had set a price and agreed to sell Hannah and Elizabeth to Smalls, he had no power to enforce the agreement if Kingman changed his mind.
Waiting was simply too risky; it could be years before he and Hannah had saved enough. The only option was escape. Much was happening in the country, and significant changes seemed inevitable. Perhaps one of these changes would give Smalls the key to freedom for himself and his family. He would be watching and waiting, ready to take action when the time came.
* * *
By the elections of 1860 the turmoil over slavery that had been brewing for decades was finally erupting. Much of the tumult was occurring in Charleston, where Smalls and many others hoping for freedom closely followed what was happening. What he did not witness on his own, he learned by listening carefully to the chatter on the streets and docks and by talking to other slaves. Like all enslaved people, his illiteracy was enforced, but he knew reading was not the only way to stay informed. In fact, Smalls was a member of several mutual aid societies that African Americans in Charleston had created. These societies typically helped their members take care of the sick, pay for funerals, and provided support to widows and children. Their members also shared important news.
Through his connections Smalls must have known that in April 1860 the national Democratic Convention had met in Charleston to nominate a presidential candidate. Tensions in the party about allowing slavery in the western territories, however, quickly divided it into Northern and Southern factions. When many of the Southern delegates walked out of the convention, the remaining delegates were unable to secure the two-thirds majority needed to select a party nominee.
Northern Democrats reconvened in Baltimore and eventually chose Stephen Douglas, a senator from Illinois, as their nominee. Douglas believed in popular sovereignty, which argued that the people of the western territories should decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Radical pro-slavery Southerners, known as fire-eaters, met in Richmond, Virginia, and nominated the sitting vice president, John Breckinridge. He wanted to follow the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which opened the territories to slavery.
The Republicans, who opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at their convention in Chicago in May. That same month the newly formed Constitutional Un
ion Party, which argued for compromise in order to preserve the Union, nominated John Bell of Tennessee when it met in Baltimore. Bell, a slaveholder, was against expanding slavery into the western territories.
Americans were now so divided over slavery that they had four presidential candidates. With so many candidates splitting the vote, Lincoln was declared the winner in November 1860 with just 180 electoral votes and 39.8 percent of the popular vote. Not surprisingly, not a single electoral vote for Lincoln came from the South.1
South Carolinians were furious at the results, believing that Lincoln was hostile to slavery and a threat to their way of life. Almost immediately an outbreak of secession fever hit the state, and six weeks after the election Charleston hosted the state’s secession convention.
On December 20, 1860, at 1:15 in the afternoon, the convention delegates voted unanimously to leave the Union, making South Carolina the first state to secede. White Charlestonians erupted in celebration at the news. “The firing of guns and the ringing of bells announced the fact to the eager populace, and ever since that time, we have been living in a scene of the wildest excitement, a double-distilled Fourth of July,” wrote a Charleston correspondent for the Boston Post. Within minutes of the declaration the Charleston Mercury, owned by Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., the son of the notorious fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., had printed its famous “The Union Is Dissolved” broadsheet and blanketed the city with copies.
When Union major Robert Anderson, the fifty-five-year-old commander at nearby Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, learned the news, he became concerned that his men and the families stationed with them were vulnerable to attack by the South Carolina militia. In an effort to protect them, Anderson moved them in the middle of the night of December 26 to Fort Sumter, a location far easier to defend. The move, however, was controversial and provocative. South Carolinians believed the federal government had no right to occupy the fort since South Carolina was no longer part of the Union. The result was a bitter standoff between the state’s militia and the federal troops at Fort Sumter.2
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 5