CHAPTER 8
Captain Smalls
Smalls had a lot on his mind In late November 1863. He and Hannah were expecting their third child any day while mourning the recent death of Robert, Jr. Smalls had done everything he could to keep his family together. He had saved them from slavery, but he had been unable to save his child from disease.
That fall was also a difficult time for the Union at Port Royal as it continued to struggle to capture Charleston. The Union had eventually taken Battery Wagner on Morris Island after a seven-week siege against the Confederates that had lasted until September 7, but Charleston had managed to remain in Confederate hands. The Union was so desperate to take the city that it had been shelling it and the Confederate fortifications in the harbor since August. The bombardment, which had heavily damaged the lower portion of the city, the only part the shells could reach, would last 567 days, the longest siege in American history.1
Despite the personal and military concerns that weighed on Smalls, he would continue to demonstrate unwavering courage. On November 26 he was once again piloting the Planter, delivering provisions from Folly Island to Morris Island, now the base for more than six thousand soldiers. As Smalls steered the steamer through a narrow creek, the vessel came under heavy fire. The Planter was caught in a crossfire from the battery at Secessionville, a Union battery on Block Island, and a Union ship, the Commodore Macdonough.2 The captain of the Planter, a man described as a “brawny white sailor,” panicked, abandoned his post, and hid in the steamer’s coal bunker.3 (By that time the Planter had been converted from a wood-burning steamer to a coal-burning vessel.) Smalls saw the captain flee and immediately took over his duties.
“There was nothing for me to do save to take charge,” Smalls later wrote, “and I brought her safe from under fire and out of danger.”4 Had he not, the vessel could have been destroyed and those aboard killed in the attack. It is also quite possible that if the Planter had been severely damaged, the crew would have had to abandon her, which might have led to their capture.5 Had that happened, Smalls would certainly have been executed in accordance with Confederate policy. Once he had the steamer out of range of the guns, Smalls captained it to Morris Island, where he safely delivered the provisions and the crew.
When the chief quartermaster of the Department of the South, J. J. Elwell, learned what had happened, he immediately issued the following order to Captain A. T. Dunton, the chief assistant quartermaster on Folly and Morris Islands:
Sir: You will please place Robert Smalls in charge of the United States transport Planter as captain. He brought her out of Charleston Harbor more than a year ago, running under the guns of Sumter, Moultrie, and the other defenses of that stronghold. He is an excellent pilot, of undoubted bravery, and in every respect worthy of that position. This is due him as proper recognition of his heroism and services. The present captain is a coward, though a white man. Dismiss him, therefore, and give the steamer to this brave black Saxon.
Gillmore approved the order without delay.6
It was a huge honor for Smalls to be appointed captain of the Planter, which had become such a large part of his life. While serving aboard that steamer, he had been promoted from deckhand to wheelman under the Confederates and from pilot to captain under the Union. With this promotion Smalls became the first black captain of an Army vessel.7 It was a remarkable journey. The New York Tribune’s Hilton Head correspondent wrote that Elwell’s order, “for simple justice to a brave and loyal negro, officially acknowledged, has seldom been equaled in this or any other department.”8 The order was printed in newspapers across the country.
Confederate newspapers also picked up the story, though they covered it with a decidedly sarcastic tone, saying that the “Yankees off Charleston make a great ado over his heroic service.”9
Although Smalls was now the Planter’s captain, he was still a civilian. In fact, only about 110 African Americans served as military officers during the Civil War, and most did not keep their commissions long. Seventy-five men who had been appointed as captains and lieutenants for the Louisiana Native Guard in the fall of 1862 had been quickly forced out when a new commander of the Department of the Gulf, determined to oust them, took over that December. The rest of the black officers of the United States Colored Troops (USCT), which had been formed in May 1863, were primarily chaplains and surgeons. By 1864 the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Regiments had appointed several black lieutenants. The following year Martin Delany, an abolitionist who had recruited thousands of blacks to join Union forces throughout the war, was commissioned as a major in the 104th USCT and became the first black regular army field officer.10
Some argued that Smalls should be made a military officer in recognition of all he had done, from seizing the Planter and delivering valuable intelligence to championing the Port Royal Experiment and providing his exceptional piloting skills to the Union, including this latest act of heroism.
Capt. Daniel Foster, a white officer in the 37th USCT, wrote to The Liberator, “There is no reason why Robert Smalls should not be rewarded for his eminent services to the country, by conferring on him rank as an officer in our glorious navy. Such an act would honor and help the country and the navy quite as much as it would the brave and capable recipient of these deserved honors and emoluments.”11
Although Smalls was not a military officer, he was handsomely paid. His new position brought him $150 per month, twice what he had been making before his promotion with the increases he had been given over time.12 The large salary was just $19 shy of what a Union major earned,13 and was a stark contrast to what black soldiers were making. Initially black soldiers were paid $13 per month, the same as their white counterparts, but the Militia Act of 1862 changed that to $10 per month. Congress would not grant equal pay to black soldiers, and provide for retroactive pay, until June 1864.14
The extra money Smalls was earning would certainly help him raise his family. His third child and second daughter, Sarah Voorhees Smalls, was born on December 1, 1863, in Beaufort. Unlike Elizabeth and Robert, Jr., Sarah was born free. But Smalls would not have much time to spend with his newborn because of his growing responsibilities to the Union.
In spite of all Smalls had accomplished, not all the publicity that accrued to him was favorable. Later in December some publications reported the false news that the Confederates had captured Smalls and the Planter. The inaccurate report, written by the Morris Island correspondent of the New Bedford Mercury, told Massachusetts readers that Smalls had run too far up Lighthouse Inlet toward Secessionville and was captured by rebel picket boats patrolling the area. “The fate of her crew,” the paper reported, “may be a rather serious matter.”15 In the confusion and chaos of war, news was often reported before it was verified, especially if it sold papers. And stories about Smalls were gold. Though untrue, the story highlighted the constant danger Smalls faced every day in piloting a Union steamer near Confederate territory. Capture was a real threat.
A few days later the special correspondent for the Baltimore American refuted the claim, writing that Smalls was still acting as a pilot in the fleet.16 The corrected story ran in major newspapers from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News to the New York Herald.
* * *
Smalls’ celebrity in the North got another boost when his name appeared in the Boston Post in a published speech by Wendell Phillips. Phillips was a famous white abolitionist and orator who had helped the antislavery movement gain momentum before the Civil War. In early January 1864 Phillips spoke at the Tremont Temple in Boston, where many abolitionists had celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation a year earlier. He was there to address his concerns about Lincoln’s Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, issued just weeks earlier.
The proclamation gave a “full pardon … with restoration of all rights of property, except as to slaves” to Confederates who were willing to take an oath of allegiance to the United States. It also contained several exceptions that made certain people inelig
ible for this pardon, including high-ranking Confederate military or naval officers, anyone who had left Congress to aid the rebellion, and “all who have engaged in any way in treating colored persons, or white persons in charge of such, otherwise than lawfully as prisoners of war, and which persons may have been found in the United States service as soldiers, seamen, or in any other capacity.”
Lincoln’s proclamation also stated that if 10 percent of voters in a Confederate state signed the oath, their doing so would reestablish a state government, making the state entitled once more to federal protection against invasion and domestic violence. The proclamation also encouraged states to find ways to help the former slaves through provisions that guaranteed their freedom, provided for their education, and offered assistance “with their present condition as a laboring, landless, and homeless class.”17
By this time in the war the Union had achieved major victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chattanooga, and many Confederate states were already under Union control.18 In issuing the proclamation, Lincoln was trying to shorten the war while also outlining his postwar reconstruction plans.
Phillips argued that Lincoln’s proclamation had made it too easy for the South to rejoin the Union; the abolitionist asserted that before the war ended, he wanted African Americans to have “citizenship as constitutionally safe as mine.” He told the packed crowd at the Tremont Temple, “Unless you put your foot upon the plan of the President you are to stand for the next seven years and see the negro practically reduced to slavery, and you cannot lift a finger to prevent it—to defend the very freedom you have made. Robert Smalls, the hero of Charleston, is to go back and hold his rights at the dictation of the … rebels of South Carolina.”19
Radical Republicans in Congress agreed. They opposed the proclamation, fearing that slavery would continue in the South, and in early July 1864 passed the Wade-Davis Bill. The bill would put the former rebel states under a military governor and required 50 percent of the state’s voter population to take the oath of allegiance before being welcomed back into the Union. It also abolished slavery in states returning to the Union and barred officials of the Confederacy from holding office. Despite their efforts, Lincoln pocket-vetoed the bill, and continued with his more lenient 10 percent plan, which he hoped would encourage Southern whites to quickly reject the Confederacy.20
* * *
While the Union was heavily debating the first plans for reconstructing the South, Smalls seized an ironic opportunity for himself and his family in late January 1864. Less than two years after he had escaped from Charleston, he bought the large white house on Prince Street in Beaufort where he and his mother had once served as house slaves.21 The house and the lot, including the sparse slave quarters where he had been born, were now officially his. Many formerly enslaved men dreamed of owning property, but few could imagine buying the home of their former master.
Smalls’ opportunity to buy the property arose when the government auctioned the house, like others in Beaufort, in lieu of unpaid taxes set by the Revenue Act. Lincoln had signed the measure in August 1861 to help fund the war effort. The act instituted several taxes, including a property tax to be levied in proportion to each state’s population.22 South Carolina’s share amounted to more than $360,000.23
While the states still in the Union had paid their share of the tax, the seceded states, including South Carolina, had not. To collect the taxes Lincoln signed another measure in June 1862 that allowed the appointment of tax commissioners to collect the money directly from owners of land in the seceded states where any Union military authority had been established. That applied to property owners in Union-occupied Beaufort, including William DeTreville, who had purchased the house on Prince Street from Smalls’ former master, Henry McKee, in 1851. Like so many whites in town, DeTreville had abandoned his home when the Union captured Port Royal Sound in November 1861 and had failed to pay the required taxes. As a result, the property was put up for auction.24
In October 1862, as Smalls was wrapping up his speaking trip in the North, three tax commissioners appointed to handle South Carolina had arrived in Port Royal. The men had quickly set up offices in Beaufort and started making their assessments.
One commissioner was William Henry Brisbane, a doctor and Baptist minister who had been born and raised near Beaufort. Brisbane had once owned thirty slaves and had been brought up to believe “all who belong to the sable race of Africa” were his inferiors.25 Much to the dismay of his slaveholding neighbors, Brisbane had changed his views by late 1840 after reading antislavery pamphlets and had sold his human property. He moved north and eventually became an ardent abolitionist who regretted selling the people he had enslaved rather than freeing them. He returned to Beaufort District, bought his former slaves back, freed them, and took them to Ohio. Now he had returned to Beaufort to serve as one of the government’s tax agents, charged with collecting the unpaid taxes owed by the white planters who had once scorned him.
The other two tax commissioners were Northern judges, William E. Wording and Abram D. Smith. Wording was also familiar with the South, as he had practiced law in Charleston at one point in his career. Smith, who had never lived in the South, was best known to abolitionists for declaring the Fugitive Slave Act, which required runaway slaves to be returned to their owners, unconstitutional while on the bench of the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The tax commissioners’ first steps were to determine the amount of taxes owed on each property and to publish all the figures, along with a 50 percent penalty for nonpayment, in the local newspapers. For the most part, owners had sixty days to pay. If the owners did not respond in time, the government would seize the land and either keep it for its own use or sell it to the highest bidder.
Determining the taxes due was no easy task because the Confederates had taken most of the records. They did, however, leave some behind in their haste, including assessment rolls that were found in a pile of trash in the attic of a house then occupied by a former slave.
By early November 1862, the newspapers had listed the amount owed by owners, who had until January 3, 1863, to pay. As suspected, few settled their accounts, and by mid-January the newspapers had published the list of properties and land in foreclosure in the Beaufort area. At the first sale, which took place in March 1863, the government sold at auction 16,479 of the 76,775 acres on which taxes were owed. (The remaining land was set aside for “Government use, for War, Military, Naval, revenue, Charitable, Educational or police purposes.”) As Brig. Gen. Rufus Saxton and many of the missionaries working as part of the Port Royal Experiment feared, the formerly enslaved were not able to compete financially, and whites bought most of the land, which went for less than a dollar per acre.26
With an outstanding debt of $48, Henry McKee’s Ashdale, the four-hundred-acre Lady’s Island plantation where Smalls’ mother, Lydia, had been born, was among those sold. It was purchased for just $250.27
McKee also owned another plantation called Gray’s Hill at the time of the auction. It comprised about 700 acres; about 160 of its acres were ultimately set aside by the government as a school to help the former slaves learn to read and write; 140 acres were sold to freedmen; and 400 acres remained unsold. Like many of his fellow planters, McKee would try to get much of his land back after the war.28
Once these properties were sold, the tax commissioners turned their attention to the homes in Beaufort. The former Henry McKee house on Prince Street, which had been sold to William DeTreville, was among the properties for sale in January 1864.
William DeTreville was the oldest son of Richard DeTreville, who had served as the lieutenant governor of South Carolina in the mid-1850s and was one of the signers of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession.29 William was just twenty-one when he bought the Prince Street home after graduating from Princeton and returning to Beaufort to practice law.
When Smalls learned that the DeTreville home would be put up for auction, he prepared to put in his bid. Whereas
soldiers had to put down only 25 percent of the bid amount and had three years to pay off the rest, civilians like Smalls had to pay the full amount in cash. And Smalls had the cash.
The sale of the first lots, which was watched closely by the Northern newspapers, began on the morning of January 19, 1864, as a crowd of Union officers, soldiers, and former slaves gathered outside the tax commissioners’ offices. African Americans new to freedom surprised many that day by doing much of the bidding. While some had earned money on their own, others had pooled their funds so that they could compete with whites.30
More than a week later, on January 28, the DeTreville house finally came up for auction. Smalls put in the winning bid of $665. It was a good deal—the house had appraised for $700—and a huge personal victory for Smalls. Years later he said, “I am proud of the fact that I live in a dwelling built on the very ground where I was born. The old homestead and its surroundings are mine, and I shall leave it for my children to enjoy.”31
DeTreville, the former owner of the house, would later sue Smalls to get the house back. DeTreville and his father, who served as his lawyer, would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1878, but Smalls would prevail and, in so doing, he would help many other families remain in their homes.32
Morrison, the tinsmith who had escaped on board the Planter with Smalls and was now a sergeant with the 34th USCT, also purchased a house at auction, his for $555. Prince Rivers, a sergeant in the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, bought two properties, probably as part of the co-op he and other members of his regiment had started. He paid $925 for one and $250 for the other. In all, blacks bought seventy-five to eighty houses and lots that ranged in price from $40 to $1,800.
Be Free or Die--The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls' Escape from Slavery to Union Hero Page 15