Robert Smalls: From Enslaved Pilot to United States Congressman

The most remarkable story to emerge from Beaufort's Civil War era belongs to Robert Smalls, a man born into slavery in this town who became a ship's pilot, a Union war hero, and a United States congressman. Smalls was born on April fifth, eighteen thirty nine, enslaved at five eleven Prince Street in Beaufort. When he was about twelve, he was sent to Charleston, where he worked on the waterfront and became an expert navigator of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts.

By the beginning of the Civil War he was working as the wheelman, the practical navigator, of a Confederate transport and dispatch boat called the Planter. On the night of May twelfth, eighteen sixty two, while the white officers of the Planter were ashore, Smalls put on the captain's distinctive straw hat, gathered a crew of fellow enslaved men and their families, and sailed the Planter out of Charleston Harbor. Passing the Confederate fortifications in the dark, he gave the correct recognition signals at each checkpoint.

When the boat reached the open waters and the Union blockade, he raised a white sheet as a flag of surrender and delivered the ship to the Union Navy. His act freed himself, his crew, and their families, and delivered a valuable Confederate vessel to the Union. His story circulated in Northern newspapers and helped persuade President Abraham Lincoln to authorize the enlistment of Black soldiers.

Smalls was made captain of the Planter, now a Union vessel. After the war he returned to Beaufort, purchased his former enslaver's house at five eleven Prince Street for back taxes owed to the Union government, and served in the South Carolina legislature and the United States House of Representatives for five terms. He died in Beaufort in nineteen fifteen, on the Prince Street property where he had been born into bondage.