Robert Smalls: From the Planter Escape to the US Congress

At three o’clock in the morning on May 13, 1862, a 23-year-old enslaved man named Robert Smalls put on the wide-brimmed straw hat and military coat of Captain Charles J. Relyea, lit the boilers of a Confederate dispatch steamer called the Planter, and quietly cast off from Southern Wharf in Charleston Harbor. Over the next ninety minutes he piloted the ship past five Confederate forts — Castle Pinckney, Fort Ripley, Fort Johnson, Fort Sumter, and Fort Moultrie — giving the correct steam-whistle signals at each. Beyond the last gun he replaced the Confederate and South Carolina flags with a white bedsheet his wife Hannah had brought aboard, and headed straight for the US Navy blockade. When the USS Onward threw down a boarding line, Smalls greeted Acting Volunteer Lieutenant John Frederick Nickels with a sentence that has been quoted ever since: “Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!”

Sixteen enslaved people — nine men, five women, and three children — were now free. The Confederacy had lost a 147-foot armed steamer with four artillery pieces, 200 pounds of ammunition, and the captain’s signal codebook and detailed maps of Charleston Harbor’s minefields. The US Navy had gained one of the best coastal pilots on the South Carolina coast. And the United States had acquired a thirty-five-year political career it didn’t yet know was coming.

Beaufort, Charleston, and the Planter

Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, behind the house of John McKee on Prince Street in Beaufort, South Carolina. His mother, Lydia Polite, was enslaved by the McKee family; his father was, by most credible accounts, John McKee himself or his son Henry. At age twelve, around 1851, Smalls was sent to Charleston to work for the McKees as a hired-out labourer, with most of his wages going back to his enslavers. He worked as a lamplighter, a hotel waiter, a stevedore, a sailmaker, and finally — by his late teens — as a sailor on the Charleston waterfront.

By the late 1850s he was the de facto pilot on multiple coastal vessels, although under South Carolina law and custom the formal title “pilot” was reserved for white men. He married Hannah Jones, an enslaved hotel maid, around 1856. They eventually had three children: a stepdaughter Clara, daughter Elizabeth, and infant son Robert Jr. Smalls reached an agreement with the McKees to keep a fixed amount of his wages each month, and used part of those savings, plus a $100 contribution from his employer, to buy his wife and daughter’s freedom for $800. He did not have enough left over to free himself.

When the Civil War began in April 1861, Smalls was assigned to the CSS Planter, a 147-foot sidewheel cotton steamer that had been built in Charleston in 1860 and was now under contract to the Confederate Army. The ship was commanded by Captain Relyea and operated under Brigadier General Roswell S. Ripley, the Confederate commander of Charleston Harbor. Its duties were laying mines, surveying waterways, and ferrying troops, dispatches, and artillery between the harbor’s fortifications. Smalls’s job was to actually pilot the ship — a job for which Relyea, who lived ashore, depended entirely on him.

The Escape: May 12–13, 1862

By April 1862 Smalls had decided to use the Planter to free himself and his family. The opportunity came from the Confederate officers’ own habits. Captain Relyea, Pilot Samuel Hancock Smith, and Engineer Zerich Pitcher had standing orders not to sleep ashore — General Roswell Ripley’s General Orders No. 5 explicitly required at least one white officer to be aboard at all times — but they routinely violated those orders to be with their families in Charleston. On the night of May 12, 1862, after the Planter had returned from moving artillery to James Island carrying four extra guns as cargo, all three white officers went home.

Smalls had discussed the plan in advance with the seven other enslaved crewmen, leaving out one man he did not trust. That evening the men’s wives and children came aboard for what was described as a routine family visit. After the official curfew they did not leave; instead they were quietly moved to the Etiwan, another steamer moored nearby, to wait out of sight.

At 3 a.m. Smalls put on Relyea’s distinctive straw hat and coat. The crew lit the boilers. The Planter cast off from Southern Wharf, steamed up the Cooper River to the North Atlantic Wharf to collect the women and children from the Etiwan, and then turned toward the harbor mouth. As the ship passed each fort, Smalls — visible in silhouette from the captain’s customary post — gave the prearranged steam-whistle signal. Each fort returned it. At Fort Sumter, the climax of the run, Smalls reportedly heard a sentry shout “Blow those damned Yankees out of the water!” as the Planter steamed past. He kept going.

Once beyond the last gun, the crew hauled down the Confederate and South Carolina Palmetto flags and ran up Hannah’s white bedsheet. The first US ship to spot them was the USS Onward, under Acting Volunteer Lieutenant John Frederick Nickels. In the pre-dawn dark Nickels initially believed the approaching steamer was a Confederate ram and ordered his gun crews to open fire. A crewman saw the white flag just as the lead gun was being aimed; the sun rose far enough to confirm it. Smalls came aboard and made his greeting. By breakfast, the United States Navy had the most detailed inventory of Charleston Harbor’s minefields and signal codes it would ever obtain in the war.

Lincoln, Black Soldiers, and Naval Service

The capture made Smalls a national figure within days. The story was reported in Harper’s Weekly, the New York Tribune, and abolitionist papers across the North. On May 30, 1862, the United States Congress passed a private bill awarding prize money to Smalls and the crew. Smalls’s personal share was $1,500 — roughly $48,000 in today’s money. He used part of it as the down payment, the following year, on the very house in Beaufort behind which he had been born, which had been seized for unpaid taxes; he bought 511 Prince Street at federal tax auction in 1863 for $650.

In August 1862, with the encouragement of Major General David Hunter, the Union commander at Port Royal, Smalls travelled to Washington with the abolitionist minister Mansfield French. He met President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The meeting is sometimes overdramatised in popular retellings — Smalls did not, by himself, persuade Lincoln to accept Black soldiers — but he was one of several Black voices the administration was hearing in 1862, and his arguments and personal example weighed in the political calculus. By the end of August, Stanton had authorised General Rufus Saxton to recruit up to 5,000 Black soldiers from the South Carolina Sea Islands. By the end of the war, approximately 179,000 Black men had served in the US Colored Troops and another 19,000 in the Union Navy.

Smalls himself returned to the Planter, now in Union service, as her pilot. He participated in at least seventeen documented military engagements over the course of the war, including the April 7, 1863, attack on Fort Sumter and the action at Folly Island Creek on December 1, 1863. At Folly Island, under heavy Confederate fire, the white captain — a man named James Nickerson — ordered surrender and then hid in the coal bunker. Smalls refused the order, fearing that Black crew members would not be treated as prisoners of war, and took command of the ship, piloting her out of range. He was officially appointed captain of the Planter shortly after, with a salary of $150 per month — making him, briefly, one of the highest-paid Black men in US military service. He remained the ship’s captain through the end of the war and was on board the Planter in Charleston Harbor on April 14, 1865, when General Robert Anderson raised the US flag again over Fort Sumter exactly four years after he had been forced to lower it. Smalls used the Planter to ferry hundreds of freed Black people from shore to the ceremony.

The Politician

Smalls’s political career began almost immediately after the war. In 1868 he was a delegate to South Carolina’s constitutional convention, which drafted the first state constitution in the South to establish a system of compulsory, racially integrated public education. He served in the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1868 to 1870, the state Senate from 1870 to 1874, and the United States House of Representatives for five non-consecutive terms — 1875 to 1879, 1882 to 1883, and 1884 to 1887 — representing the Lowcountry districts that included Beaufort and the Sea Islands.

In Congress, Smalls focused on Black voting rights, civil rights, public education, and military pensions for Black veterans. He was one of the small group of Black Republicans who watched Reconstruction collapse in real time after the Compromise of 1877 withdrew federal troops from the South. In 1877, Smalls himself was convicted on what most historians treat as a politically motivated bribery charge connected to a printing contract — he was sentenced to three years but served only three days before being pardoned by South Carolina Governor William D. Simpson in April 1879, as part of a deal that also dropped federal election-fraud charges against several white Democrats.

His most quoted public statement comes from a speech he delivered to the South Carolina constitutional convention of 1895, where the white Democratic majority was rewriting the state constitution to disenfranchise Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and “understanding clauses.” Smalls, one of only six Black delegates among 160, fought the new constitution and lost. From the floor he said: “My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”

After leaving the legislature, Smalls served as US Collector of Customs at the port of Beaufort from 1890 until 1913, a federal patronage post that survived the disenfranchisement campaign because it was appointive rather than elective. He died on February 23, 1915, aged 75, in the same house at 511 Prince Street that he had been born behind, that he had bought from the federal government in 1863, and that his former enslaver’s widow Jane Bond McKee had lived in with him, rent-free, until her death decades earlier.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Two common simplifications appear in popular tellings of Smalls’s life. The first is the idea that he single-handedly persuaded Lincoln to enlist Black soldiers. He did not; the policy emerged from many sources — the manpower needs of the war, the lobbying of Frederick Douglass and Black community leaders across the North, the strategic case made by Generals Saxton and Hunter, and the administration’s own evolving political calculations. Smalls’s contribution was real but not solitary.

The second is the framing of his postwar career as a smooth ascent. It wasn’t. The 1877 bribery prosecution, the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters in South Carolina by the 1895 constitution, and the violent reassertion of white supremacy across the Reconstruction South all happened during Smalls’s lifetime and substantially limited what he could do. The defining context of his political career was watching the gains of Reconstruction be rolled back, decision by decision, while he tried to preserve as much as he could from his federal patronage post in Beaufort.

The honest summary: Smalls’s escape on May 13, 1862, is one of the most dramatic single acts of self-emancipation in the historical record, and his subsequent thirty-year political career is one of the most underappreciated American legislative careers of the nineteenth century. Both deserve telling on their own terms, without inflation in either direction.

Why It Still Matters

The house at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973 and is privately owned by Smalls’s descendants. The Robert Smalls Monument was installed at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort in 1976. The Robert Smalls International Academy serves Beaufort schoolchildren today. In March 2023, the US Navy formally renamed the guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville, which had honoured an 1863 Confederate victory, as USS Robert Smalls (CG-62), the first US Navy warship named for him. The renaming was carried out under the federal Naming Commission established by the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro signed the order in February 2023.

That sequence — born enslaved behind a Beaufort house in 1839, dies a free citizen in the same house in 1915, gets a US Navy cruiser named for him 108 years later — is itself a usable summary of American history’s slowness. Smalls’s own answer to that slowness was the line he kept returning to throughout his political career: “all they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.” It is, for an American politician of his generation, a remarkably modest demand. It was also, for most of his life, considered radical.

For more on the wider history this story belongs to, see our pieces on Black Americans in the Revolutionary War, the Lost Cause and Confederate memory, and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Frequently Asked Questions

How did Robert Smalls escape from slavery?

On the night of May 12–13, 1862, Robert Smalls and seven other enslaved crewmen of the Confederate armed transport CSS Planter waited until the ship’s three white officers — Captain Charles J. Relyea, Pilot Samuel Smith, and Engineer Zerich Pitcher — went ashore for the night in violation of standing orders. Smalls disguised himself in Relyea’s straw hat and coat, lit the boilers at 3 a.m. on May 13, picked up the crewmen’s families from a nearby wharf, and piloted the ship past five Confederate forts in Charleston Harbor — Castle Pinckney, Fort Ripley, Fort Johnson, Fort Sumter, and Fort Moultrie — giving the correct steam-whistle signals at each. Beyond the last gun he surrendered the Planter to the USS Onward of the Union blockade. Sixteen enslaved people were freed in total.

Did Robert Smalls really meet Abraham Lincoln?

Yes. In August 1862, with the encouragement of Major General David Hunter, Smalls travelled to Washington, DC, with the abolitionist minister Mansfield French and met President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. Smalls argued for the enlistment of Black soldiers in the Union Army. He was one of several voices the Lincoln administration was hearing on the question, alongside Frederick Douglass and senior military commanders, and within weeks of the meeting Stanton authorised the recruitment of up to 5,000 Black soldiers from the South Carolina Sea Islands.

Was Robert Smalls really the first Black captain of a US Navy ship?

Effectively yes, although the precise terminology is contested. On December 1, 1863, during a Confederate attack near Folly Island, the Planter‘s white captain James Nickerson ordered surrender and then hid in the coal bunker. Smalls refused the order — fearing his Black crewmen would not be treated as prisoners of war — took command of the ship, and piloted her out of range under fire. He was officially appointed captain of the Planter shortly after, at a salary of $150 per month, making him the first Black man to command a US naval vessel.

How long did Robert Smalls serve in the US Congress?

Smalls served five non-consecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives: 1875–1879, 1882–1883, and 1884–1887, representing South Carolina’s 5th and then 7th Congressional Districts. He had previously served in the South Carolina House of Representatives (1868–1870) and the South Carolina Senate (1870–1874). After Congress, he served as US Collector of Customs at the port of Beaufort from 1890 until 1913.

Where can you visit Robert Smalls’s house today?

The Robert Smalls House at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort, South Carolina — the house Smalls bought at federal tax auction in 1863 from the former estate of his enslavers — was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973. It is privately owned and not regularly open to the public, but the exterior can be viewed from the street. The Robert Smalls Monument stands at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Beaufort, where he is buried.

Is there a US Navy ship named after Robert Smalls?

Yes. In February 2023, the Naming Commission established by the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act recommended renaming the Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Chancellorsville (which had honoured an 1863 Confederate battle). On March 1, 2023, Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro formally renamed her USS Robert Smalls (CG-62). She is the first US Navy warship to bear his name.

Sources

1. US National Park Service — “The Planter” (Charles Pinckney National Historic Site)
2. Smithsonian Magazine — “The Thrilling Tale of How Robert Smalls Heroically Sailed a Stolen Confederate Ship to Freedom”
3. PBS, Henry Louis Gates Jr. — “Which Slave Sailed Himself to Freedom?”
4. US Naval Institute News — “USS Chancellorsville to Be Renamed After Former Slave Who Captured Confederate Ship,” February 27, 2023
5. National Underground Railroad Freedom Center — Robert Smalls
6. Andrew Billingsley, Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families (University of South Carolina Press, 2007)
7. Cate Lineberry, Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero (St. Martin’s Press, 2017)
8. Edward A. Miller Jr., Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915 (University of South Carolina Press, 1995)
9. James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Negroes Felt and Acted During the War for the Union (Pantheon, 1965)
10. US Congress, House of Representatives — Robert Smalls, biographical entry in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress