Samuel · forgotten history

The ship that sailed itself to freedom

Charleston harbor, just before dawn, May 13, 1862. A Confederate steamer eases past Fort Sumter, gives the correct signal, and does not stop. The man at the wheel is enslaved.

He is also wearing the captain's straw hat.

Robert Smalls was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839. As a young man he was taken to Charleston and put to work on the waterfront, and the harbor became his education. He learned the channels, the shoals, the tide, the timing. He learned the signal codes that Confederate batteries demanded from every ship moving in and out. Eventually he was working aboard the Planter, a cotton steamer the Confederacy had pressed into service as a transport, carrying men and guns around the harbor he knew better than almost anyone alive.

Which is to say: the Confederacy had taught him exactly how to steal the ship.

The night

On the night of May 12, the Planter's white officers, Captain Relyea and his two mates, went ashore to sleep in the city, as they often did, leaving the enslaved crew aboard. Smalls was about twenty-three.

At some point in the small hours he put on Relyea's wide-brimmed straw hat, ordered the boiler lit, and had the South Carolina and Confederate flags run up as decoys. Around two in the morning, the Planter eased away from the dock and slid past the headquarters of General Ripley, who was, at that moment, asleep not far away.

The first stop was not escape. It was family. Smalls took the ship to the West Atlantic Wharf and picked up his wife and children, along with other women, men, and a child from the crew's families. By the time it cleared the wharf, there were roughly seventeen people aboard, most of them people the law said were property.

Then came the passage, and the passage is the part that still makes my skin prickle. The Planter had to sail past the most heavily defended harbor in the Confederacy. At Fort Johnson, and then at Fort Sumter at about quarter past four, Smalls gave the signals required of any steamer leaving port. He folded his arms the way Relyea did, so that in the half-light the figure in the pilot house would read as white. He blew the whistle as he passed. Reportedly, he did it as coolly as if General Ripley himself were aboard.

No one fired. No one stopped them. That is the whole trick: not luck, not speed, but knowing the language well enough to say nothing wrong.

Past the last battery, the crew ran up a white bedsheet and steered for the Union blockade fleet. The Planter was handed over. Smalls, his family, and his crew were free.

What happened after

The Planter was taken into Union service as a warship. The escape became a national story in the North, and it mattered beyond the seventeen people on board: it was direct, undeniable evidence that enslaved people were not passive, that they were steering events themselves, and that they knew the South's defenses from the inside.

On May 30, 1862, Congress authorized payment to the crew for the captured vessel, half the proceeds, with fifteen hundred dollars to Smalls for his part. He could not read or write when he escaped. He went on to serve with the Union, and after the war he represented South Carolina in the United States House of Representatives. He died in Beaufort in 1915.

I keep coming back to the hat. He didn't need to be brave in the way that word usually means. He needed to have paid attention for years to a system that assumed he wasn't paying attention, and then to walk out its front door wearing its own clothes, calmly, on the one night nobody was watching the wheel.

Sources

PBS, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross — "Which Slave Sailed Himself to Freedom?" (pbs.org). U.S. National Park Service, "The Planter" (nps.gov). Gettysburg College, The Gettysburg Historical Journal, R.M. Neubauer on the Smalls escape. Dates and details cross-checked against these.