Robert Smalls Stole a Confederate Ship and Sailed His Family to Freedom

We have been taught the history of Black America as a history of suffering — of chains and whips and auction blocks, of endurance and survival, of waiting and hoping and finally being granted, by the magnanimity of white benefactors, some fraction of the freedom that was ours by right of birth. It is a history that centers white action and Black passivity, white cruelty and Black patience, and it has been told so many times and so effectively that even Black people have internalized its essential premise: that our story is the story of what was done to us, not the story of what we did. And then there is Robert Smalls, who did something so audacious, so brilliant, so thoroughly devastating to the narrative of Black helplessness that one begins to understand why his name does not appear in most American history textbooks: not because his story is unimportant, but because it is too important — too dangerous to the comfortable assumptions on which the entire architecture of American racial understanding has been built.

On the morning of May 13, 1862, in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina, an enslaved man put on a Confederate captain’s straw hat, took the wheel of a Confederate military transport ship armed with four guns and loaded with two hundred pounds of ammunition, navigated past five Confederate checkpoints by mimicking the white captain’s mannerisms and giving the correct signal codes at each fortification, picked up his wife and children and twelve other enslaved people from a prearranged rendezvous point, sailed past the guns of Fort Sumter — the very fort where the Civil War had begun — and delivered the ship, its weapons, and its cargo to the United States Navy. He was twenty-three years old.

The Making of a Man Who Would Not Be Owned

Robert Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, in Beaufort, South Carolina, to Lydia Polite, an enslaved woman who worked in the household of Henry McKee. The circumstances of his birth carried the particular cruelty that was so common in the slaveholding South it barely merited comment: his father was almost certainly a white man, probably McKee himself or a member of the McKee family, though the historical record is deliberately vague on this point, as it is deliberately vague on the parentage of millions of mixed-race children who were born into slavery — evidence of the intimate violence that the slaveholding class committed by night and denied by day.

Lydia Polite made a decision when Robert was young that would shape the entire trajectory of his life: she deliberately exposed him to the harshest realities of slavery. She took him to see slave auctions. She made him watch as families were separated and human beings were sold like livestock. She wanted him to understand, with the clarity that only firsthand witness can provide, exactly what the system was and exactly what it intended for him. Some mothers shield their children from the world. Lydia Polite armed hers with the truth.

At the age of twelve, Smalls was sent to Charleston, where he was hired out to work on the waterfront — a common practice that allowed enslaved people to work in urban trades while their masters collected their wages. On the docks of Charleston, Smalls learned to sail. He learned to navigate the intricate waterways and shifting channels of Charleston Harbor. He learned to read the tides and the currents. He learned the signal codes that Confederate vessels used to pass the fortifications that guarded the harbor. He memorized every detail, stored it, waited. For years, he waited.

“My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be the equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
— Robert Smalls, address to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, 1895

The Night of the Planter

By 1862, Smalls had risen to the position of wheelman — essentially the pilot, though an enslaved man could not hold the title — of the CSS Planter, a Confederate military transport ship that carried troops, supplies, and armaments through Charleston Harbor. The Planter’s white officers, Captain C. J. Relyea and his mates, had developed a habit that would prove fatal to the Confederacy: on evenings when the ship was docked, they went ashore to sleep in their homes rather than staying aboard as regulations required. This left the enslaved crew — Smalls and seven other Black men — alone on a fully armed Confederate vessel.

Smalls had been planning for months. He had discussed the plan with the other crew members, all of whom understood that failure meant execution. He had arranged for his wife, Hannah, his children, and several other enslaved families to be at a specific location on the waterfront. He had studied the signal codes, the checkpoint procedures, the timing of the sentries. He had observed that Captain Relyea was roughly his height and build, and that from a distance, in the pre-dawn darkness, a man wearing the captain’s distinctive straw hat and standing at the wheel in the captain’s characteristic posture would be indistinguishable from the captain himself.

At approximately 3:00 a.m. on May 13, 1862, with the white officers ashore, Smalls fired the Planter’s boilers, cast off the lines, and steered the ship away from the dock. He wore the captain’s hat. He stood the way the captain stood. He kept his arms folded across his chest, the way the captain did. The ship moved through the harbor toward the first checkpoint.

At Fort Johnson, the first fortification, he gave the correct signal — two long blasts and one short blast of the steam whistle. The sentries waved the Planter through. At the next checkpoint, the same. And the next. At each Confederate battery, the guns that could have blown the Planter out of the water remained silent because the man at the wheel knew the codes, held the posture, wore the hat. The Confederacy saluted Robert Smalls past its own defenses.

The most dangerous moment came at Fort Sumter, the most heavily fortified position in the harbor. As the Planter approached, Smalls gave the signal. There was a pause — a pause that, for the sixteen people on board whose lives depended on the next few seconds, must have felt like the suspension of time itself. Then the sentry acknowledged the signal, and the Planter passed.

Once beyond the range of the Confederate guns, Smalls hauled down the Confederate flag, raised a white bedsheet that Hannah had brought for this purpose, and steered for the Union blockade fleet. He had told his wife and the other passengers that if they were caught, he would blow up the ship rather than return to slavery. It was not a bluff. But it was not necessary. The USS Onward, a Union gunboat, spotted the white flag, held its fire, and received the Planter and its passengers. Robert Smalls delivered to the United States Navy a fully armed Confederate vessel, two hundred pounds of ammunition, a cache of weapons, and — most valuable of all — his own knowledge.

The Intelligence That Changed the War

What Smalls brought to the Union Navy was worth more than any ship. In his years of navigating Charleston Harbor, he had memorized the locations of every Confederate mine — called “torpedoes” at the time — planted in the waterways. He knew which channels were safe for Union ships and which were deadly. He had detailed knowledge of Confederate fortifications, troop strengths, supply lines, and defensive plans. He provided military intelligence that would prove essential to Union operations along the South Carolina coast for the remainder of the war.

His arrival in the North was a sensation. Newspapers across the Union ran the story. Here was living proof that enslaved people were not the docile, contented, intellectually inferior beings that the slaveholding South claimed they were. Here was a man who had outthought, outmaneuvered, and humiliated the Confederate military using nothing but his intelligence, his courage, and the knowledge he had accumulated while the Confederacy considered him property. His feat was so impressive that it helped shift Northern public opinion toward the enlistment of Black soldiers, and he was personally involved in persuading Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to authorize Black military units.

Smalls himself served the Union Navy for the remainder of the war. He was made a captain — the first Black captain of a vessel in the service of the United States — and commanded the Planter, the very ship he had stolen, in seventeen military engagements. He was under fire repeatedly. He never flinched. The man who had been considered property proved himself a better sailor and a braver soldier than the men who had claimed to own him.

From the Deck of a Ship to the Floor of Congress

After the war, Smalls returned to Beaufort, South Carolina, and did something that carries a symbolic weight so heavy it is almost unbearable: he purchased the house of his former master, Henry McKee. The house where his mother had been enslaved, where he had been born into bondage, where he had been considered a piece of furniture with legs — he bought it at a tax sale, moved in, and lived there. When McKee’s elderly wife, who had fallen into poverty, came to the door disoriented and confused, Smalls took her in and cared for her until she died. The man who had been her property became her caretaker, and in that act of generosity there is a moral grandeur that makes the entire edifice of white supremacy look exactly as small and shabby as it is.

But Smalls was not content to live in a symbol. He entered politics during Reconstruction, that brief and luminous window when Black Americans participated fully in the democratic process for the first and, arguably, last time. He served in the South Carolina state legislature. He was a delegate to the state constitutional convention. And then he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served five terms, from 1875 to 1887.

In Congress, Smalls fought for the rights of the people he had risked his life to free. He advocated for public education, for the protection of Black voters against the growing tide of white supremacist violence, for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that were being gutted in practice even as they remained on paper. He introduced legislation to desegregate public transportation and public accommodations — decades before the Civil Rights movement. He fought for the establishment of a public school system in South Carolina that would serve Black children. He established schools himself, using his own money and his political connections to fund the education that he knew was the foundation of everything else.

The Erasure

And then he was erased. Not by violence, though violence surrounded him — during the Red Shirts campaign of 1876, white supremacist paramilitaries terrorized Black voters across South Carolina, and Smalls himself was the target of assassination attempts. He was erased by the same slow, methodical process that erased Reconstruction itself: the withdrawal of federal troops, the imposition of Jim Crow laws, the systematic disenfranchisement of Black voters through poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses. By the time he left Congress in 1887, the window was closing. By the time he died in 1915, it had slammed shut.

But the deeper erasure was the one performed by the textbooks, by the standard American history curriculum that for over a century managed to discuss the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the entire arc of Black American experience without mentioning his name. Robert Smalls is not in most high school history textbooks. He is not in most college survey courses. He is not in the popular imagination. Ask a hundred Americans to name a hero of the Civil War era and you will hear Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Robert E. Lee (who was not a hero but is remembered as one), Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. You will not hear Robert Smalls. A man who stole a Confederate warship, served in the Navy, served in Congress, purchased his master’s house, and established schools for freed people has been reduced to a footnote that most Americans have never read.

“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
— James Baldwin

This erasure is not accidental. It is functional. A people who do not know the story of Robert Smalls can be sold the story that Black Americans have always been acted upon, never acting — always receiving, never seizing — always waiting for freedom to be granted rather than taking it with both hands. A people who know the story of Robert Smalls understand something fundamentally different about themselves and their history: that agency, not victimhood, is the central thread of the Black American experience, and that the most important moments in that experience are not the moments when someone gave us something but the moments when we took what was ours.

Why His Story Matters More Than Victimhood

There is a version of Black history that is comfortable for everyone. It is comfortable for white Americans because it positions them as the primary actors — the villains, yes, but also the saviors, the ones who eventually decided to do the right thing. It is comfortable for a certain strain of Black political thought because it positions Black Americans as the recipients of justice rather than the makers of it, which creates a permanent moral claim on the national conscience and, not incidentally, a permanent justification for the transfer of resources. It is a story in which the most important thing Black people ever did was suffer, and in which the appropriate response to that suffering is an eternal posture of demand.

Robert Smalls destroys that story. He did not wait for Lincoln to free him. He did not petition for his rights. He did not appeal to the conscience of his oppressors. He studied his situation, identified his opportunity, made a plan, accepted the risk of death, and acted. And then he kept acting — in the Navy, in the legislature, in Congress, in his community — not as a symbol of suffering but as a man fully in possession of his own agency, his own intellect, and his own destiny.

This is the history we need. Not the history that teaches us to mourn, though there is much to mourn. Not the history that teaches us to demand, though there is much that is owed. But the history that teaches us what we are capable of — what we have already done, under circumstances that would have crushed a people who were anything less than extraordinary. Robert Smalls, with no education, no resources, no allies, no protection, and no guarantee of anything except death if he failed, conceived and executed one of the most daring operations of the Civil War, served his country with distinction, represented his people in the highest legislative body in the nation, and built institutions that would serve his community for generations.

If he could do that — in 1862, in the heart of the Confederacy, with the legal status of a piece of furniture — then the question of what we can do in 2026, with the full protection of the law, the accumulated resources of the most prosperous Black population in human history, and the freedom that men like Smalls purchased with their lives, is not a question of capability. It is a question of will. Robert Smalls had the will. The question facing us is not whether we have inherited his circumstances. Thank God we have not. The question is whether we have inherited his nerve.