Robert Smalls
Robert Smalls (1839-1915), an enslaved Black teenager in South Carolina, began work on the docks at Charleston Harbor. He became a longshoreman, rigger, sail maker, and wheelman in the harbor. After the outbreak of the Civil War, Smalls was forced to pilot the Confederate military steamboat CSS Planter to deliver Confederate soldiers, supplies, and weapons. He was made to lay mines along the rivers and waterways on the South Carolina coast. During the night of May 12, 1862, the three white officers left the Planter to sleep onshore, and Smalls, only 23 years old, enacted his plan to free himself and seven other enslaved men and their families. Smalls piloted the Planter past five Confederate forts using the hand gesture codes he knew and wearing a straw hat similar to what the Captain’s usually wore.
When he reached the Union vessels, Smalls gave the Planter to the Union along with the Confederate code book, a map of the Confederates mines (called torpedoes), and four large Confederate artillery pieces he had retrieved the day before from the Stono River.
Smalls was welcomed as a wheelman, and he piloted the Planter to the Union controlled Beaufort-Port Royal-Hilton Head area. Smalls helped find and remove the mines the Confederates had laid.
In 1863, he piloted the USS Keokuk for the Union's bombardment of Fort Sumter. The Keokuk was sunk, but Smalls’ bravery was rewarded with command of the USS Planter, making him the first African American captain in the U.S. Navy.
Smalls became famous as a war hero throughout the North, and his actions helped President Lincoln decide to accept African-American soldiers into the Union Army. In 1864, Smalls led a boycott that resulted in desegregation of the Philadelphia’s transit system, and after the war, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and pushed for integration of U.S. Army regiments and equal accommodation for Blacks and whites on interstate conveyances. Smalls spent his last years in Beaufort where he served as port collector.
In 1997 the University of South Carolina founded an annual lecture series named for Smalls, and in 2007 the US Army commissioned the USA Major General Robert Smalls, the first Army ship named for an African American.