Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, on the fifth of April 1839. He was leased by his owner to work as a wheelsman on the Confederate military transport ship Planter in Charleston Harbor through the early years of the Civil War.

On the thirteenth of May 1862, while the white officers were ashore overnight, Smalls and seven other enslaved crewmen commandeered the Planter, picked up their families at a rendezvous point, and steamed it through Charleston Harbor's Confederate forts under the password he had memorized. Once beyond the harbor he surrendered the ship to the Union Navy blockade. He delivered to the Union Navy the Planter itself, a full load of Confederate ordnance, and the secret signal codes of the Charleston Harbor defenses. The intelligence haul accelerated the Union assault on Charleston by approximately a year.

He served as the Union's first Black captain of the Planter through the remainder of the war, conducted seventeen further engagements with Confederate forces, and was wounded in action.

He returned to Beaufort, purchased his former owner's house at auction in 1863 (the white widow continued to live in the house under his roof for the remainder of her life), founded the South Carolina Republican Party, and served five non-consecutive terms in the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina between 1875 and 1887.

He died in Beaufort on the twenty-third of February 1915, age seventy-five.

He is honored here as the enslaved wheelsman who stole a Confederate gunship and served five terms in Congress.