The newly freed men and women were not the only ones taking advantage of the turmoil in the area. Some Union soldiers strayed from their new encampments and plundered abandoned plantations on Hilton Head and other nearby islands. When they were finished taking anything of value, they destroyed whatever was left.
Brig. Gen. Sherman was furious when he learned of his soldiers’ actions. He issued orders forbidding soldiers to enter private homes and emphasized that “the right of citizens to be secure in their property must continue.”33 Du Pont also was outraged at the pillaging and ordered his men to stop any unsanctioned boats on their way to the various islands.34
* * *
Du Pont and Sherman had not expected the white residents of Beaufort District to flee and leave behind ten thousand slaves. Hoping to entice the whites to return, Sherman posted a proclamation in the New York newspapers that he addressed to the people of South Carolina. The proclamation urged them to come back to protect their property, which included the black men, women, and children they had abandoned, and was meant to assure the former residents that the Union had no intention of harming them or their property in its attempt to stop the rebellion. Despite his efforts, the South Carolinians ignored the notices.35
Sherman then sent two men to carry the proclamation to Beaufort on November 14. No one was left in Beaufort District to whom they could deliver it, but Sherman had a plan to get the proclamation to former residents. He had also given the two men a private letter addressed to Reverend Wilson, a Beaufort resident who was also a British citizen. Before he had fled, Wilson, who seemed to be playing both sides, had secretly left a note asking the Union for protection because of his nationality. Sherman hoped that his men could find someone who could deliver his letter to Wilson and that Wilson would agree to act as a messenger and bring the proclamation to the former residents. If Sherman’s long shot worked and the residents returned, the Union would not have to take on the responsibility of caring for the abandoned slaves.
Sherman’s messengers, Lt. Augustus Wagner, from Sherman’s staff, and Francis Bacon, surgeon of the 7th Connecticut Volunteers, went by gunboat to Beaufort. From there a newly freed man guided the men into the interior of Port Royal Island by mule. Wagner and Bacon were taking a significant risk by heading into enemy territory without any military support, as no one knew how many Confederate troops remained in the area.
Carrying a flag of truce, the party moved toward the Port Royal ferry in the hope of finding someone they could trust to deliver the letter and proclamation. As they passed abandoned homes, they saw blacks working in the fields but no whites. After about eight miles they saw a lone white man on horseback, Rev. Joseph Walker, the rector of Beaufort’s St. Helena Episcopal Church. Wagner and Bacon called for Walker to stop, but initially he ignored them. Wagner and Bacon persisted, however, and eventually Walker spoke with them.
As they talked, two Confederate soldiers approached on foot; they, too, were carrying a flag of truce. One was Henry McKee, Smalls’ owner; the other was Capt. Thomas O. Barnwell. It was an unexpected turn of events, but the Union officers peacefully received the Confederate soldiers.
The group, including Walker, spoke for half an hour. McKee and Barnwell explained that they knew that their former slaves, not Union soldiers, had looted Beaufort, but they attributed the former slaves’ actions to an attempt to keep anything of value from the Union. The Union men had a far different interpretation: they surmised that the destruction was retaliation. The Confederates also said that they had sent slaves to Beaufort to burn it but that the men had decided to stay and occupy the homes in Beaufort rather than destroy them. McKee and Barnwell apparently wanted the Union men to know that they had tried to keep the town out of their hands.
Although the Confederates were willing to talk to the Union officers, they were not willing to deliver the proclamation on behalf of the Union. McKee and Barnwell said that because the proclamation was meant for “loyal citizens” of the United States, and there were none in South Carolina, there was no one to whom they could deliver it.
Their refusal was hardly a shock to the Union officers, who knew their only chance was to engage Reverend Walker in their plan. They continued to plead for his assistance, and Walker finally agreed to deliver the letter and proclamation to Wilson. The Confederate soldiers did not interfere.36
Regardless of Sherman’s efforts, the citizens who had fled did not return. The Union’s arrival had shattered the lives they had been leading. Beaufort, the first town in the Deep South captured by the Union, and the surrounding area had suddenly changed forever. In a matter of days the way of life that had existed for generations was gone. The planters had fled their homes; they had been forced to burn their cotton and any remaining would soon be taken by the Union; their slaves were now in Union hands and essentially free; and their property would be confiscated. They had lost everything. Some would never come back, preferring to remember the town as it had once been. Others would spend years after the war trying to reclaim their homes and property. Despite their best attempts, they would never again hold the power and prestige they had claimed before the war.
* * *
The Union quickly established its headquarters on Hilton Head Island, which, before its arrival, had consisted of more than twenty plantations, Fort Walker, and little else. In deference to the strategic value of the sound, however, the military and the press would refer to the headquarters and surrounding area as Port Royal.
Within weeks Port Royal was humming with activity as fourteen thousand Union soldiers occupied the area. New buildings, wharves, and horse-drawn wagons quickly changed the barren landscape, while numerous ships crowded the nearby waters. A new era had begun.37
* * *
Smalls soon learned of the dramatic events in Beaufort, as did the rest of Charleston. The change he had been waiting to see for most of his life appeared to finally be taking place. Those who had kept him, his mother, and so many others enslaved had lost their reign over the Port Royal area. And now thousands of Union forces were just miles from Charleston. Smalls had to believe it was only a matter of time before they reached the city.
With this news, Smalls also celebrated that his mother, Lydia, was essentially free. The Union labeled her and the other former slaves in Beaufort as contrabands, but she was now within Union lines. Although he still must have had concerns about her well-being, he knew she was far safer in Union territory than in that of the Confederacy.
While Smalls and the rest of Charleston anticipated a Union attack, another event caused as much damage as the Union might have that winter. On a windy and chilly evening in December 1861, a month after the Battle of Port Royal, a devastating fire blazed through the streets, leaving a path of destruction roughly a mile long and one-seventh of a mile wide. It caused an estimated $8 million in damage and burned 145 acres. Residents and fire fighters had tried to stop it from engulfing block after block, but the flames had continued to spread. When the fire finally died, nearly six hundred homes, as well as churches and public buildings, had burned to the ground. Much of Charleston suddenly looked as if it had already been shattered by war.38
Adding to the devastation caused by the fire were dangerously dwindling supplies of medicine, food, manufactured goods, and other necessities. Blockade runners brought these provisions into Charleston, but the prices for these everyday items had skyrocketed and quantities were limited. The city’s residents were so desperate for basic necessities that the Charleston Mercury was running stories about how to make soap. Luxuries were even more scarce, and the paper excitedly announced when a few dozen bottles of cologne arrived.39 The city, whose former prosperity and strident secessionist beliefs had once made some Charlestonians feel invincible, was now weak and suffering, pervaded by a wholly unfamiliar sense of vulnerability and panic. For enslaved men and women like Smalls and Hannah, these difficult times for the city made their harsh lives even more so.
Despite the difficulties, Charlest
on and its population would get no sympathy from the North. The city was now so reviled that in February 1862 the Union major general George B. McClellan wrote to Gen. William T. Sherman that “the greatest moral effect would be produced by the reduction of Charleston and its defenses. There the rebellion had its birth; there the unnatural hatred of our Government is most intense; there is the center of the boasted power and courage of the rebels.”40
Charlestonians were keenly aware of the hatred for them in the North and the extreme pride the Union would have in capturing their city. After all, Charleston had hosted the Democratic convention in April 1860 and South Carolina’s secession convention that December, and the following April the first shots of the war had been fired in the city’s harbor. Most Charlestonians had no doubt that the Union was itching for the city to feel its full wrath.
* * *
Much to the surprise of Charleston’s residents, the Union attack did not come that winter or even that spring. The city remained on alert when the Union captured New Orleans in late April. By May 1862 the Confederates were so certain that an assault was imminent they prepared to instate martial law in Charleston. Confederate president Jefferson Davis had already declared Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, under martial law in late February in anticipation of Union attacks. Days later he had done the same in Richmond.41
Fears among the white citizens of Charleston only escalated when the Union major general David Hunter, a fervent abolitionist, unexpectedly declared all enslaved people in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina free on May 9. The proclamation was a surprise even to other Union military leaders in Port Royal, including Du Pont, who remained in charge of the naval forces.42
Less than two months earlier, at the end of March, Hunter had replaced Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman, who had been in charge of the land forces at Port Royal. Hunter was now the commander of the Union’s newly formed Department of the South, which included the three states in which Hunter had declared the slaves free.
The fifty-nine-year-old Hunter, who dyed his long mustache dark brown to match the wig he wore in an effort to look younger, was originally from Princeton, New Jersey, and had been in the Army for most of his adult life. He was nicknamed “Black Dave” for his dark complexion and gray eyes, and while stationed in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1860 he had started a correspondence with Abraham Lincoln, then the Republican presidential nominee. Lincoln was so impressed with Hunter and the strong antislavery views he advocated in his letters that the president-elect invited him to ride the inaugural train from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., in February 1861. Hunter’s friendship with the new president also helped him secure a high-ranking appointment in Washington that led to his fast promotion to major general.43
Only weeks after he arrived at Port Royal, Hunter, generally a quiet man but possessed of almost unparalleled determination, had placed the states in his new department under martial law. He argued that it was a military necessity because those states had taken up arms against the United States. He then reasoned that “slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible,” so the enslaved people in the three states were “forever free.”
The controversial proclamation made headlines throughout the country and infuriated Lincoln. Hunter had acted without Lincoln’s approval, and Lincoln rescinded the proclamation as soon as he learned of it.
Hunter was not the first Union general to issue such a proclamation. Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, responsible for the Department of the West, had issued a similar announcement a year earlier, asserting that the war was a war against slavery. Frémont, however, had limited his proclamation to those slaves whose owners were in rebellion. Hunter had declared freedom for all the slaves, regardless of their owners’ loyalties. Both men had stepped well beyond their authority in issuing such declarations, and Lincoln quickly revoked Frémont’s proclamation, just as he had Hunter’s.
Hunter’s motivation was based largely on his beliefs as an abolitionist, but he also wanted to give newly freed African American men a strong reason to fight for the Union. Before Hunter arrived in Port Royal, he had met with Secretary of War Stanton, who privately supported enlisting blacks in the Army. At this meeting Hunter is thought to have received approval from Stanton to enlist black soldiers, even though Army policy still forbade it.44
African Americans had served in the Revolutionary War and in the War of 1812, but the Militia Act of 1792 prevented blacks from bearing arms on behalf of the U.S. Army. When many African American men tried to enlist at the outbreak of the Civil War, they were turned away. The Lincoln administration was opposed to enlisting African Americans primarily because it feared that doing so would push the still-loyal border states to secede.45
Hunter was so certain that he had Stanton’s approval that he had been in Port Royal for only three days when he asked the War Department to send 50,000 muskets, 10 million rounds of ammunition, and 50,000 red pantaloons for his new recruits.
Despite Hunter’s enthusiasm, he had quickly learned upon arriving in the area that most of the newly freed blacks did not want to fight if they were not guaranteed freedom. Some also feared that the Union was trying to trap them and send them as slaves to Cuba, just as their Southern owners had claimed the Union would.
To encourage these African American men to enlist, Hunter declared his unsanctioned emancipation proclamation on May 9, 1862. But he was impatient to see if the order had the intended effect. Two days later he ordered several companies of his soldiers to bring five hundred formerly enslaved men, aged eighteen to forty-five, from the Sea Island plantations to Beaufort. On May 12, the day before Smalls escaped from Charleston, Hunter’s soldiers went from one plantation to the next to gather men. Many blacks went voluntarily, but those who would not were forced at gunpoint.
Despite Hunter’s forceful measures, once the men reached Hilton Head, they were given a choice of whether to join the Army. The majority enlisted.
As word of the emancipation of the enslaved people in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida spread, many in the North who were against slavery cheered while the South fumed. The strong reaction, both pro and con, overshadowed the government’s concerns about Hunter’s creating a black regiment and the extreme actions he had taken to do so. In the coming weeks the Lincoln administration would be so busy denouncing the proclamation and handling the fallout from it that it would not formally address the recruiting of black soldiers until that summer.46
* * *
As Hunter was preparing to assemble a black regiment, Smalls was planning his escape. Just hours later he, his crew, and his beloved family were safely in Union hands.
CHAPTER 4
Union Hero
As waves rocked the Planter, Robert Smalls proudly presented the guns to the dashing young John Frederick Nickels, the captain of the Onward, who had come very close to destroying the ship a few minutes earlier. The moment was surreal. After years of longing to find a way out of slavery for his family, Smalls had finally done it. He and his family had escaped. He would no longer have to worry about his wife or his children being sold and separated from him. He would no longer have to worry that they would be sent to the Work House or that Hannah would be raped or beaten. Smalls had accomplished what had seemed nearly impossible and now was turning over a Confederate steamer and four desperately needed cannon.
Nickels must have been shocked as he realized what Smalls and his crew had achieved and just how much their act would benefit the Union. Every gun helped further the cause, whether for the North or South, and Smalls was not just adding cannon to the Union arsenal, he had also taken guns away from the Confederates.
After Smalls announced that he had brought the guns, Nickels boarded the Planter. The group of newly freed men immediately surrounded him and asked if he had an American flag he could spare. Nickels soon took down the makeshift white flag flying from the Planter and replaced it with an American one. The Planter was now a Union vessel.1
The
women and children appeared on deck, and the women began shouting with happiness. Hannah was so excited she raised Robert, Jr., over her head and told him to look at the flag. “It’ll do you good,” she said.2
As the rejoicing continued, Smalls gave Nickels the newspapers the crew had brought out of Charleston the day before.3 They would help the Union understand what the Confederates did and did not know about the Union military and would give Nickels and other officers a glimpse of daily life in the city.
Smalls also turned over a book from the Planter that included the secret code for reading Confederate wigwag signals.4 Wigwags were coded messages transmitted across line-of-sight distances by an officer performing specific combinations of motions with a flag; each motion represented an alphanumeric character determined by the signaling code. At night the Confederates used torches instead of flags.5 The book’s value to the Union was significant. Before the Confederates realized that the code had been compromised, the Union would be able to read signals sent from Fort Sumter, Fort Moultrie, and Morris Island to headquarters in Charleston.6
* * *
Nickels soon welcomed Smalls and the rest of the company to the Onward as the men and women continued to celebrate their newfound freedom. Just hours earlier, masters had controlled their lives. Now, although they were still considered contrabands by the U.S. government rather than completely free, they had a chance to create their own futures.
* * *
As Nickels provided the commanding officer of the Union fleet with the details of Smalls’ escape, the city of Charleston awoke to martial law and the embarrassing realization that the Planter had been taken. Its citizens shuddered in disbelief.
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 7