Robert Smalls had to get the ship out of the harbor without arousing suspicions.
He had to get past each of five gun batteries without allowing his face to be seen, while giving the correct signal to guarantee the ship would not be stopped.
He had to be lucky enough for some small thing to not foul the whole thing up.
And the lives of every person on that boat would be changed for the best if he succeeded and for the worst if he failed.
And no matter how he fared, he knew every other black Confederate -- and probably most slaves, period -- would feel retribution regardless of the outcome.
I have taken dramatic license with some of the parts of Robert Smalls' life. I hope anyone who prefers complete accuracy will bear in mind the artistic intent of this effort and value it over the parts I conflate or embellish.
Supporting documents again withheld to allow the sense of drama for those who want to sustain it. The story's known; how do you want to learn about it?
In one account of the beginning of the escape, some of the slaves beg Robert to ... not do it. To do it differently. They beg "for a change of course." Maybe they are afraid of going past so many people who could stop them, who could end their lives.
But there is no other way. Robert couldn't risk having his face seen -- the white crewmembers normally on the ship (but absent on this night) trusted him, as various accounts state or imply, but would some random Confederate soldier approve of a slave piloting a ship into a blockade?
Robert would do what he could to avoid the answer to that question. Meanwhile, he, by one account dressed as ship captain, navigated the vessel from in front of a general's house to under the walls of Fort Sumter.
The challenges, and the opportunities for one thing to go fatally wrong, were about to escalate.
Would things go as they needed to?
But that was the wrong question. He needed to focus on what he could make sure he got right; he needed to just keep being the pilot of a Confederate ship, to keep going, step by step.
The ship was approaching the second key test in this journey: getting past Fort Sumter and its ready battery of cannons, any number of which could blow a hole in a ship not sailing under the fort's walls.
But that was not the main reason Robert had chosen that course:
He kept to the shadows inside the pilothouse, hiding his face under the brim of the captain's hat.
Not an inch of Robert's skin was visible from where the fort's guards were -- or he hoped it was all obscured.
But now was not time to be adjusting his gloves or pulling his hat farther down. Now was the time to act like he was expecting to be allowed past.
Smalls blew the steam whistle twice and waved to the guards standing 40 feet above. "Pass The Planter," shouted one of the Rebels. "Blow the damned Yankees to hell, or bring one of them in!"
Smalls shouted out "Aye, aye!" -- and The Planter sailed on out of the range of the cannons.
And Robert Smalls guided his Confederate ship past where the first shots of the Civil War had been fired.
As much as Robert was worried, imagine being his wife, Hannah Smalls. Two small children -- asleep, one hopes, but for how long? And an infant son will sleep when he chooses and wake when he chooses. Another small child will be only barely more cooperative if she is sufficiently agitated.
If the young daughter is hungry, she may not understand (even with that talk before they went to hide by the wharf) how desperately important it is to keep playing the quiet game. And what if she is too cold or afraid to keep quiet or still? It is 3 a.m., and she is surrounded by giant hulking metal, at or below sea level, in a vessel equipped for transport, not comfort. If she is awake, she is a tremendous liability.
This is either the most exciting or the most frightening place to be as a child. I hope to hell she'd been given something harmless that put her to sleep or that she was already so thoroughly asleep nothing -- not even a steam whistle -- would wake her.
Now, one account tells us, and it makes perfect sense to me, that anyone who was not a member of the crew was hiding in the artillery.
Let us suppose that the ship's crew and mission had been found out. Robert would have been dead but for the details, but there is the faintest chance that not everyone else would have been discovered.
Also, it would make sense for Robert, pilot of the ship, to be taking it somewhere on the general's orders. Presumably he would have been seen by fort guards taking the ship this way and that in the months before. So too would the slave workers aboard the ship have been seen tending to their various duties.
Not so women or children -- especially not an infant.
So combined with the cold and noise elements and one account's word, ... I'm thinking the wives and families of any slave aboard the ship were hiding in among Confederate materiel, anxiously quiet for infinite forevers, waiting for signals they could but hope and falsely confidently assume meant the trip was going according to plan.
What muted relief must have coursed through the minds and bodies of those hidden slaves once the steam whistle blew twice and the ship rocked forward again after that agonizing slowness. There they were, captive on such breath-stopping levels -- slaves already, but made to be quiet at all costs, and at the whim of a plan that could be planned only so far, in the dead of night, subject to the whims of any one person ending the plan where it began or just before it was to end.
If it went suddenly and horribly wrong, how could they know?
What abject fear must have bubbled under the surface of the bravest, unevenly and incompletely infused with what confidence they could fake until the first person broke down or the first squeak of a cry laid bare the plain fact of the matter:
This was not an adventure. This was pure danger.
With each change in boat movement, did they know what was happening? They knew Robert was navigating the river -- did they know, could they know how any of it was going?
Another double steam whistle blow. The ship slowed down again.
Were the feet marching around firmly above them the feet of their husbands safeguarding the mission or of white Confederates hopping aboard for quicker passage from one fort to the next?
The ship sped up again.
They had been hidden in there for two hours. Cold and dark -- a candle could be dropped, starting a fire or causing other and unneeded trouble -- had become stuffy and dark.
Your average group of untrained people is not going to be able to keep absolutely quiet for two hours. And any noise in a situation where lives depend on quiet prompts fear of the noise attracting attention but also ... anger.
Anger at that person for being unable to keep quiet. Anger at that person for bringing an infant along for the ride -- how could the person be so selfish? Anger at that person for sneezing or moving or whatevering.
The anger is, of course, a manifestation of one's own fear of being that next person to make a sound, of being that person who makes that fatal sound. And it is also a manifestation of the general lack of control over the situation -- you are sitting there, helpless, while not running for your live but sitting in the dark and increasing heat and mugginess and cramped unfamiliarity and fundamental shitlessness while something is happening, and
all you can do is nothing.
How would they sleep again after this -- if there were an after to this forever? They could collapse from fatigue, sure, but sleep? Being in a dark space would trigger memories, induce nightmares.
And not just dark but any other small thing and they would go back psychologically to being afraid for their lives for hours upon hours of rocking and meaning-blunted noises and fear-saturated uncertainty.
And they might have no idea why.
After the first fort was passed, the record reveals no drama on Robert's part in navigating through to the last fort.
We know better. In moments of prolonged fear, what is routine is checked and rechecked. You check it to keep your mind off the fear, and you check it because all you can do is control what you can control.
And because being certain of something induces the certain belief that you have forgotten something so crucial that you might as well just end everything then.
By one account, Robert and his fellow slaves left port at 3 a.m. May 13, 1862, and passed the last fort at dawn.
After they passed that last fort, what happiness did they have? The most important and uncertain part of the escape was ahead.
Robert looked around and saw ... no other Confederate ships in sight.
The next job, then, was to surrender and hope the ship that captured his would be led by men who allowed for the possibility that a black man was good for something beyond enslavement. Fighting for the Union, after all, did not mean a man loved his African-American brother.
The goal of the mission was to be captured by the Union. As such, Robert raised a bed sheet as a white flag.
The man in charge aboard one Union vessel nearby noticed the Planter advancing.
And he saw his chance to make a name for himself and harm the Confederacy in the same instant.
Lt. J. Frederick Nickels, commander of the U.S.S. Onward, ordered that guns be lowered to aim squarely at the vessel and blow it out of the water. The Union blockade would not be so much as scuffed by a measly ship like the Planter.
Robert kept the ship moving toward the Onward. The white flag was raised, and he was directing no hostilities at the ship -- its guns were put away with his family and the other slaves who were not part of the ship's crew.
He could not turn back. He could only keep going and hope the plan did not falter because of hasty action.
The Onward was now nearly ready to fire at the Planter. Union sailors checked the heights of their guns against where they expected the Planter to be when the shots reached it.
One sailor noticed a bit of white. Then not.
And then again. Almost floating there, but not quite, in front of the ship like ...
He abandoned his post at once and rushed to find the lieutenant.
"Lieutenant Nickels," he gushed roughly, "I think that Confederate ship is flying a white flag."
Nickels turned back at once to look at the ship and ...
"It's a white flag, sir! It's coming in to surrender to us!"
"I don't believe it," Nickels said, warming warily to the idea. "Why in the world would the Confederates be surrendering a ship to us?"
Nickels gave the order for the guns to be reset to their previous height.
Robert saw the guns' movement and very nearly collapsed. What was the biggest piece of guesswork in the whole ordeal had nearly been navigated.
How -- how in this or any world -- could he have known that the ship he picked to sail toward would not turn his tiny vessel into so much flotsam, the people aboard it into largely nameless casualties?
Robert guided his boat up to the Onward and waved to the captain.
As soon as possible, sailors from the Onward were boarding the Planter to make sure this was not some mischief meant to interfere with the blockade.
"Open the hatch and you'll find --" Robert began.
Nickels was now onboard the ship. "We will search the ship," he said matter-of-factly.
He searched the ship and found Robert's family, along with the other slaves, four pieces of artillery and explosives. At Robert's request, an American flag was run up the ship's flagpole.
And Robert himself bore something else -- something that got him an audience that day with Commodore Samuel Francis Du Pont, commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron.
Robert knew everything about the Confederacy. Specifically, he had this information:
mine placement, rebel troop dispositions, and a code book of Confederate flag signals[.]
With that information, Du Pont would in November 1862 attack Port Royal, S.C., extending the Union blockade of Confederate waters, as part of Gen. Winfield Scott's plan to blockade the whole coast. Robert's intelligence would help Du Pont extend that blockade from southern Georgia down to the tip of Florida.
And it would factor in his promotion to rear admiral.
Meanwhile, the adventure had only just begin for Robert and his wife and children, all newly free citizens.
To be continued tomorrow, if I have time.