Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls was born into slavery on 5 April 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina, and was hired out by his enslaver to work in Charleston as a young man, eventually gaining substantial experience working on the city's harbour vessels, developing detailed knowledge of Charleston's waterways, shipping routes and naval signals that he would later put to extraordinary use. By the outbreak of the Civil War he was working as a wheelman (a skilled position just below captain) on the CSS Planter, a Confederate military transport ship.

In the early hours of 13 May 1862, while the Planter's white officers were ashore for the night, Smalls, along with a small crew of other enslaved men working aboard the ship, executed an audacious plan: he donned the captain's uniform and hat, and using his intimate knowledge of the ship's signals and the harbour's checkpoints, sailed the Planter directly past several Confederate forts, giving the correct recognition signals at each checkpoint to avoid suspicion, before piloting the ship out of Charleston harbour toward the Union naval blockade.

Smalls successfully delivered the Planter, along with its Confederate crew's families who had been secretly brought aboard, its cargo of weapons, and crucially valuable intelligence about Confederate defences and a coded book of Confederate signals, directly to the Union fleet, securing freedom for himself, his family and the rest of the enslaved crew in one of the war's most daring acts of self-liberation. The event received extensive press coverage across the North, making Smalls an immediate celebrity and effective symbol used to advocate for allowing Black men to formally serve as soldiers in the Union Army.

Smalls used his sudden fame to advocate directly and successfully to President Lincoln for the recruitment of Black soldiers into Union forces, and he continued serving the Union Navy for the remainder of the war, eventually being promoted to captain of the very ship he had commandeered, the Planter, making him one of the first Black captains of a US vessel and one of the highest-ranking Black naval officers of the entire war.

Following the Civil War, Smalls returned to Beaufort, South Carolina, purchasing his former enslaver's house at a tax auction and living there for the remainder of his life, and entered Reconstruction-era politics, being elected to the South Carolina State Legislature and later serving five terms in the US House of Representatives between 1875 and 1887, representing South Carolina during the brief Reconstruction period when Black political participation in the South reached levels not matched again for nearly a century.

Smalls remained politically active as Reconstruction ended and Southern states implemented increasingly severe Jim Crow segregation and disenfranchisement laws, continuing local political appointments including as customs collector for the port of Beaufort. He died in 1915 in the same house he had purchased from his former enslaver, having lived to witness both the extraordinary political gains of Reconstruction and their subsequent systematic dismantling, a life spanning one of the most dramatic personal and national transformations in American history.