Since his teenage years, slave Robert Smalls had been leased out by his owner to toil on the South Carolina waterfront. By the outbreak of the Civil War, he had become a skilled pilot—and was in a prime position to make a break for freedom.
Since his teenage years, slave Robert Smalls had been leased out by his owner to toil on the South Carolina waterfront. By the outbreak of the Civil War, he had become a skilled pilot—and was in a prime position to make a break for freedom.
Harper’s weekly, courtesy of library of congress

‘A Hero’

In a commandeered Confederate steamer, Robert Smalls piloted himself and other slaves to freedom and garnered the plaudits of a grateful Union Navy.
By Commander Benjamin Armstrong, U.S. Navy
February 2021
Naval History Magazine
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In the quiet morning hours of 13 May 1862, a pair of deckhands cast off all lines on board the side-wheel steamer Planter as she got up steam in South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. The deckhands were slaves, most of them leased out to the ship’s owner to stoke the fires, work the decks, and haul the cargo as the vessel moved around Charleston’s waterways in the service of the Confederacy.

The ship herself was hired out to Brigadier General Roswell S. Ripley, the Confederate commander of the defense of Charleston. Used as a dispatch boat, cargo hauler, and troop transport, the Planter also was seen locally as the general’s personal ship. A few hours before dawn broke across the Atlantic horizon, however, the Planter had a new and different mission: freedom.

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1. Andrew Billingsley, Yearning to Be Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 34–42.

2. Craig Symonds, The Civil War at Sea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 147–49.

3. “Services of Robert Smalls,” House Executive Document 1546, 54th Congress, 1st Session, 2.

4. Cate Lineberry, Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to the Union (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2017), 21–22.

5. “Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs,” 23 January 1883, House Executive Document 1962, 47th Congress, 2nd Session, 2.

6. “Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs,” 2.

7. “Services of Robert Smalls,” 2.

8. “Onward I (Clipper Ship),” Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/o/onward-slipper-ship-i.html.

9. J. F. Nickels to E. G. Parrot, 13 May 1862, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, series 1, vol. 12 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1901), 822.

10. Lineberry, Be Free, 72–73.

11. E. G. Parrott to Samuel Du Pont, 13 May 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 12, 821–22; Parrott to Acting Master Watson, 13 May 1862, Official Records, series 1, vol. 12, 822.

12. Joseph P. Reidy, “Black Men in Navy Blue During the Civil War,” Prologue 33, no. 3 (2001), www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2001/fall/black-sailors-1.html.

13. Samuel Du Pont to Gideon Welles, 14 May 1862, in “Services of Robert Smalls,” 3.

14. Lineberry, Be Free, 93

15. Lineberry, Be Free, 103–4.

16. Billingsley, Yearning, 78–81.

17. Lineberry, Be Free, 89–91.

18. “Robert Smalls,” New-York Daily Tribune, May 20, 1862.

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Commander Benjamin Armstrong, U.S. Navy

CDR Armstrong is an assistant professor of war studies and naval history at the U.S. Naval Academy. He holds a PhD in war studies from King’s College London. His most recent book is Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).

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