* * *
Smalls and his family finally returned to Port Royal in late October and soon learned that the South’s anger at an enslaved man’s making his escape by taking a Confederate ship had not abated. He was still a wanted man.
At least one attempt was made to seize Smalls shortly after he returned when a group of men arrived in Beaufort and inquired about the location of Smalls’ house. Someone raised an alarm, and Union soldiers were able to capture the group.30
Smalls refused to be intimidated, however, and quickly returned to resume his duties as a pilot for the Union. But he found the Union facing another threat equal to that of the Confederates—yellow fever. An outbreak had started at headquarters at Hilton Head about a week before Smalls returned to the area. At the time doctors were still unaware that mosquitoes spread yellow fever, also known as yellow jack. Some even speculated that the cause of this latest epidemic had been the turning of dirt for new fortifications at Hilton Head.
Since the beginning of the war the Union had feared the toll that warm-climate diseases such as yellow fever and malaria would take on its soldiers fighting in the South. When Hunter became commander of the Department of the South in the spring of 1862, he gave specific directives for his soldiers to follow during the hot summer months. This included rising shortly after sunrise, receiving “quinine in prophylactic doses, each dose combined with half a gill of whisky” during the hottest hours of the day, and enjoying “good cooking.” He also recommended fishing in the early morning and at night.31 Hunter believed that if they followed these rules and maintained good hygiene, the soldiers would have nothing to fear.
These precautions, of course, failed to save many men, including Maj. Gen. Ormsby Mitchel, from the bites of infected mosquitoes. Ormsby had replaced Hunter as commander of the Department of the South in early September 1862. (Brig. Gen. John Milton Brannan was briefly in charge between Hunter and Mitchel.) At the beginning of the outbreak, Mitchel had moved his staff from Hilton Head to Beaufort. Five days later he succumbed to the disease.
On October 31, the day after Mitchel died, Smalls ran into Du Pont and another Union officer, Capt. John Rodgers, in Beaufort. Smalls had not seen Du Pont since his return. The two Union officers had arrived by boat from Port Royal that morning to serve as pallbearers at Mitchel’s funeral.
Rodgers must have shared Du Pont’s concern about the effect on Smalls of his trip to the North, and Rodgers patronizingly asked Smalls if his head had been turned by the attention he had received. Smalls’ reaction was as calm as it was brilliant. Du Pont reported that Smalls “replied it was turned one way all the time he was North—towards Port Royal.”
Smalls was using his charm and diplomatic skills, but he was also sincere in his efforts to help the Union in whatever way he could. As a free man he and his family could easily have stayed in the North rather than return to the South, where the hefty bounty hung over his head and threatened his life.32
* * *
Soon after Smalls returned, he learned that the Planter was no longer under the Navy’s control. While Smalls was away, Du Pont had turned the Planter over to the Army’s Quartermaster Corps because of the Navy’s difficulty in supplying the vessel with the wood it needed for fuel.33 Without access to the Planter Smalls probably was piloting other vessels for the Navy.
Smalls was ambitious and now had some money, so it was not surprising that he also found a way to own a store for freedmen during this time, even though property was not for sale in occupied Beaufort. The formerly enslaved men and women were earning money as part of the Port Royal Experiment and needed supplies, and Smalls’ store provided them. He was soon making a large weekly profit.
But for Smalls financial success was not enough, and his patriotism and commitment to ending slavery was evident in a story Saxton told about him at a November celebration in Beaufort. On that clear fall day hundreds of former slaves, along with white plantation superintendents and missionaries, had packed themselves into a Baptist church in the middle of a grove of live oaks. The reason for the gathering was to honor the continued success of the Port Royal Experiment and the new regiment of black soldiers Stanton had authorized Saxton to create.34
The regiment, which was named the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry Regiment, incorporated the men from Hunter’s regiment who had been furloughed and those he had kept under arms. The rest of the regiment, which was headquartered at the former John Joyner Smith plantation on the Beaufort River, was made up of new recruits from Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina and would soon number six hundred.
Saxton had set aside that November day as one of “thanksgiving and praise.” It would be another year before Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation dedicating the last Thursday of November as a holiday. Until then the celebration had been observed mostly in New England and other Northern states and usually on different dates.
The Thanksgiving festivities in Beaufort included the singing of the spiritual “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” followed by a sermon and a speech given by Saxton encouraging young black men to enlist in the new regiment. Saxton tried to further inspire the crowd that had packed the church by discussing the bravery of the regiment’s white leader, Col. T. W. Higginson, a radical abolitionist and Unitarian minister from Massachusetts. Saxton also shared a story about Smalls.
When Smalls had come to see Saxton the day before, Saxton had asked how his store was faring, and Smalls told him he was making “fifty dollars a week, sometimes.” It was a large amount of money by anyone’s standards, but Smalls wanted something more. He told Saxton that instead of continuing with the store, he was going to enlist as a private in Saxton’s new black regiment. The news came as a surprise to Saxton, particularly since Smalls was doing so well. When Saxton asked him why, Smalls displayed the patriotism and courage for which he had become known. He replied, “How can I expect to keep my freedom unless I fight for it? Suppose the Secesh should come back here, what good would my fifty dollars do me then? Yes, sir, I should enlist if I were making a thousand dollars a week.”
By sharing the story with the audience, Saxton hoped to encourage even more young black men to join. Smalls was a hero to many across the country, and especially to African Americans in Port Royal, and his willingness to join would surely motivate others. Charlotte Forten, the first African American teacher from the North to arrive in the South to help the former slaves, was there that day and found Saxton’s speech stirring and thought it would “prove very effective.”35
The early success of the regiment was also likely to inspire young men to join. By the time of Saxton’s speech, several companies of the regiment had already seen action and had proved their courage and skill beyond any question. Saxton wrote to Stanton: “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.”36
Despite Smalls’ interest in joining the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, he ultimately did not enlist in the regiment. Smalls may have decided that he could be more effective as a pilot, or Du Pont may have convinced Smalls of how desperately his skills were needed in the Navy.
A few months later Du Pont would put Smalls’ considerable talents into action in the first Battle of Charleston.
CHAPTER 7
The Keokuk
On January 1, 1863, as the country entered its third bloody year of war, Lincoln issued the long-awaited Emancipation Proclamation. For Smalls and millions of other African Americans, it was a day they had dreamed of for years but had never been sure would actually come. On that momentous New Year’s Day, celebrations erupted throughout the North as well as in the Union-occupied South. In Boston three thousand black and white abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, met at Tremont Temple to honor the day. In Norfolk, Virginia, about four thousand
African Americans marched through the city’s streets to drums and fifes while carrying Union flags.1
Although the historic edict officially freed all enslaved people in the rebellious states, with few exceptions most in the South remained in servitude until the Union could enforce the proclamation in the areas where they lived. It did not include freeing the slaves in the four border states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, which remained in the Union.2
The proclamation nevertheless officially freed many people in parts of the South controlled by the Union, including those at Port Royal. It also made ending slavery an official aim of the war and explicitly allowed African Americans to join the armed services “to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.” There was no denying that the proclamation demonstrated a profound change in Union policies.
Saxton was among those who wanted to mark the occasion and ordered his own celebration on Port Royal Island. Smalls was unable to attend, perhaps because he was taking care of a sick child or handling another family obligation, but he must have been in the thoughts of those who participated, because his seizure of the Planter less than a year earlier had inspired many of them. Now those who had celebrated Smalls’ freedom officially had their own.
Thousands of blacks and whites arrived at the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry’s headquarters that morning. The former plantation was packed as people vied for a clear view of the stage filled with dignitaries and the band of the 8th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment.
Following a prayer and a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, Rev. Mansfield French presented the colors of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers to Col. T. W. Higginson, the regiment’s white leader. The silk flag was a gift from the New York Church of the Puritans and was embroidered with the name of the regiment and the words “The Year of Jubilee has come!”
Just as Higginson started waving the flag, however, a “strong male voice (but rather cracked and elderly)” unexpectedly broke into song, bellowing, “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” Two female voices soon joined him and were quickly followed by many more. The moving moment was one that no one in attendance would soon forget.
When whites on the platform tried to join in, Higginson motioned for them to stop. He thought the newly freed African American men and women deserved the chance to sing the patriotic words on their own. “I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap,” Higginson wrote.
It seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed. Nothing could be more wonderfully unconscious; art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it; and when I came to speak of it, after it was ended, tears were everywhere … Just think of it!—the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people.3
* * *
With the Emancipation Proclamation in place, the days of slavery were now numbered, but the difficulties of the war were far from over. The next few months would prove especially challenging for the Union and for Smalls. The Union would lose its attempt to capture Charleston in a fierce battle in which Smalls served as a pilot, and Smalls would face the loss of one of his beloved children.
For months Washington had been pressuring Rear Admiral Du Pont, who was in charge of naval forces at Port Royal, to capture Charleston. The Union had faced more losses, including the Battle of Fredericksburg, one of the largest and deadliest of the war, in December 1862, and the country was weary. The Union desperately needed a victory. Although Charleston was not as strategically important as other military targets, its symbolism as the cradle of the Confederacy made it extremely valuable.
Instead of attacking the city as ordered, however, Du Pont continued to ask Washington for more ships in early 1863. With every passing day Lincoln and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles grew more frustrated with Du Pont. Du Pont certainly wanted to capture Charleston and understood its significance, but he had reservations about the type of ships he was ordered to use in the attack. Gustavus Fox, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was determined that Du Pont use only ironclad ships, primarily monitors (a type of ironclad that rode low in the water and had heavy guns in a turret), to take Charleston. Fox seemed to think the monitors were invincible.
Fox may have been infected by the “monitor madness” that had broken out in the North after the battle of the ironclads Monitor and Virginia at Hampton Roads in March 1862. Although the Union had approved the use of three ironclad designs in 1861, including the New Ironsides and the Galena, it was the Monitor, nicknamed “cheesebox on a raft” for its unique design, that had captured the country’s imagination after the battle.4
Du Pont, however, did not share Fox’s confidence in the capabilities of the new monitors, which remained largely untested. The original Monitor had sunk in a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, on New Year’s Eve 1862 and carried sixteen crew members to their deaths. The ship had been on its way to Port Royal to participate in Du Pont’s attack on Charleston, but it was not well equipped for the open seas, and it foundered in the storm.
Du Pont was especially concerned with the monitor’s offensive capabilities against Charleston. At this point in the war Charleston’s defenses were even more formidable than when Smalls had made his escape. The Confederates had fortified the harbor with additional batteries, obstructions, and torpedoes (mines), making Charleston the most protected city in the country. Du Pont referred to the harbor as “a good deal like a porcupine’s hide and quills turned outside in and served up at one end.”5
Despite Du Pont’s concerns, he was reluctant to voice his concerns. Another officer, fifty-four-year-old Capt. John Dahlgren, chief of the Bureau of Ordnance, desperately wanted a sea command and had been lobbying to take charge of the assault on Charleston. Dahlgren, inventor of the smoothbore cast-iron cannon with the distinctive “soda bottle” shape that would take his name, had powerful friends, including Lincoln, and was determined to get his way. Dahlgren even convinced Adm. Andrew Hull Foote to suggest to Du Pont that he retire, allowing Dahlgren to take command. Du Pont, a man who had devoted his life to the Navy, did not take the suggestion well. He wrote to Fox that Dahlgren was a “diseased man on the subject of preferment and position … Now he wants all the honors belonging to the other but without having encountered its joltings—it is a disease & nothing else.”6
The Navy stood behind Du Pont and sent all but one of its ironclads to him, giving him a total of nine for his mission against the city. Welles wrote, “We have furnished Du Pont the best material of men and ships that were ever placed under the command of any officer on this continent, and, as regards officers, unequalled anywhere or at any time.”7 Having won the battle to lead the mission, Du Pont was not in a position to continue to complain about the monitors.
Du Pont’s flagship would be the seagoing New Ironsides, a massive 3,500-ton steamship that carried sixteen 11-inch guns and two 200-pound rifled Parrott guns and was plated with iron four and a half inches thick. It was the largest and most heavily armored of the three original ironclads. He was also given seven new 900-ton monitors. Five were equipped with an 11-inch and a 15-inch gun, and two had one 11-inch and one 200-pound Parrott gun. Rounding out the fleet was the 750-ton Keokuk, an experimental ironclad screw steamer. The vessel featured two 11-inch cannon that could be moved within its two turrets, and the armor on its sloping sides featured alternating rows of wood and iron. Smalls would serve as its pilot.8
Smalls had initially hoped to accompany the land forces of the expedition and use his hero status to help rally the thousands of enslaved people who were prepared to take up arms against the Confederates. He had informed military leaders at Port Royal that ten thousand black men in and around the forts at Charleston and six thousand behind the batteries in Savannah, members of a secret organization who had been taught to use guns, were ready to strike when the Union landed. The Liberat
or, the abolitionist newspaper founded by William Lloyd Garrison, reported that Smalls said that if he accompanied the land forces, he felt “assured that, in less than ten days, he can have ten thousand blacks, fully armed, who will be of more service to us in South Carolina at this time, than an equal number of white soldiers.” The paper also reported that Smalls thought “Charleston … must be totally destroyed in the approaching conflict.”9
Despite Smalls’ wishes, the Navy thought Smalls’ skills were best used as the pilot of the Keokuk. Although Smalls was disappointed, he was honored to be piloting one of the vessels that would attack the city where he and his family had suffered for years under slavery.
* * *
In early April 1863 Du Pont finally readied his fleet of ships for attack. The guns of the ironclads were powerful, but they numbered only thirty-four in all, far fewer than those held by the Confederates. The ironclads’ 15-inch guns were also slow to fire; they could be discharged only six or seven times per hour.10 To make the most of their firepower, the ships would have to be strategic in their firing and get as close to the forts as possible.
It would largely be a naval mission, which was what Welles and Lincoln wanted. Maj. Gen. David Hunter, who had returned in January as the commander of the Department of the South after Mitchel died of yellow fever, had planned to land forces on Folly, Cole’s, and North Edisto Islands in preparation for the attack, but his troops would never join the battle.
On the clear afternoon of April 7, 1863, Du Pont was ready to initiate the naval assault. At about noon, the earliest hour the vessels could attempt to enter the harbor because of the tides, the ships moved into the order of battle. The Weehawken took the lead, followed by three other monitors. The New Ironsides, Du Pont’s flagship, was positioned in the middle of the formation to make it easier to signal all the ships. Three other monitors followed the New Ironsides, while the Keokuk took the rear position with Smalls in the pilothouse.
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 13