The adventure had only just begin for Robert and his wife and children, all newly free citizens.
At 3 a.m. May 13, 1862, Robert, Hannah, Elizabeth Lydia and Robert Jr. Smalls were slaves.
At 3 p.m. May 13, 1862, Robert, Hannah, Elizabeth Lydia and Robert Jr. Smalls were free.
And Robert was one of the most wanted men in America.
Now, how would he navigate these waters?
(Language may offend some. Don't read this if racial epithets could get you in trouble.)
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?
Back in Charleston, meanwhile, a bunch of niggers had stolen a ship and were missing.
The ship's white crew -- or rather, the former Confederate ship's crew for the moment -- now faced Brigadier General Roswell Ripley, who was understandably very slightly miffed that every white member of the crew had gone ashore, leaving the ship to a bunch of slaves with no reason to stick around being slaves.
Ripley had served the United States Army with distinction in the Mexican-American War, fighting under General Zachary Taylor. He had been promoted first to captain, then to major. He had left the Army in 1853, but he joined the Army of South Carolina when the state seceded.
He had been promoted to command South Carolina's coastal defenses in August 1861. Now, less than a year later, a ship had been stolen from his house.
The telegram dated May 14, 1862, from Major General John Pemberton was brief:
I have just learned by telegraph that steamer Planter, with five guns aboard, intended for the harbor, was stolen in Charleston this morning.
Ripley's response was slightly longer:
The mischief has occurred from the negligence of the captain and officers of the boat and their disobedience of orders, a copy of which is herewith inclosed, and which had been repeatedly urged upon them. I shall prefer charges against them at an early day and lay them before the general commanding the department.
To Ripley's lieutenant fell the duty of informing Pemberton that "Neither the captain, mate, nor engineer were on board at the time of her departure" -- a violation of Navy rules -- and, after naming the men, writing that "Four of her colored crew and one of the colored crew of the steamer Etowah are missing, and are supposed to be parties to the theft."
And seven pieces of artillery were missing.
Left relatively unscathed in this ordeal was Major Alfred Rhett, who had to report only that things seemed to be going normally -- that the ship was often out at 3 a.m. doing whatever it was supposed to be doing.
As for the white leadership mentioned in Lieutenant Ravenel's letter, accounts differ. In two, Captain C.R. Relyea was found guilty of "Disobedience of Orders and Neglect of Duty." In one, Samuel H. Smith is not mentioned; in the other, he is among those convicted. One does not mention first mate Hancock; another says he was found guilty. Engineer Zerich Pitcher is convicted in one account, not mentioned in the other. (Confused yet? Try researching it. Researching mistakes made by one person get reported as fact by another. 's a pile of fun.)
Every conviction was overturned because the men in question were not, as the saying would become, regular army. They were contract workers.
Not that this was likely to help their cause in the future:
They had let a bunch of slaves make off with a Confederate boat.
Robert Smalls was to become a dirty word in the South -- the Planter would be the only Confederate ship stolen by slaves.
But in the North, he was a hero, an instant celebrity:
Robert Smalls, with whom I had a brief interview at General Benham’s head-quarters this morning, is an intelligent negro, born in Charleston, and employed for many years as a pilot in and about that harbor. He entered upon his duties on board the Planter some six weeks since, and, as he told me, adopted the idea of running the vessel to sea from a joke which one of his companions perpetrated.
The pilot is quite intelligent and gave some valuable information about the abandonment of Stone.
And the country should feel doubly humbled if there is not magnanimity enough to acknowledge a gallant action because it was the head of a black man who conceived, and the hand of a black man that executed it.
Robert, the intelligent slave and pilot of the boat, who performed this bold feat so skillfully, informed me of this fact, presuming it would be a matter of interest to us to have possession of this gun.
This man, Robert Smalls, is superior to any who has yet come into the lines, intelligent as many of them have been. His information has been most interesting, and portions of it of the utmost importance.
Seventeen days after Robert Smalls piloted the Planter and more than a dozen slaves to freedom, he talked directly to God -- or as close as even he was likely to get.
Robert Smalls met President Abraham Lincoln. Personally.
Robert told the story of his escape to the president of the United States.
Personally.
And Lincoln also personally signed a bill awarding Robert $1,500 for the Planter, and $500 each to several other now-ex-slaves for their roles. (The Confederacy, in a rare moment of wisdom, put the price for Robert's return at $4,000.)
But there was, forgive him, bigger news still for Robert:
He got his mother back.
Lost among the headlines (Civil War-era newspapers' front pages were ... an experiment in font and size) and the audiences with powerful and famous Americans, hidden between the interviews and the excitement of a new life, ... had to be one singularly sorrowful realization.
How many slaves had they left behind?
The man Robert had watched be whipped was still a slave. Could Robert go back for him?
Such an effort would be stupid at best. He did not know where the man was; he had not been back to that property in years.
The boy who had picked cotton with Robert -- he was now a teen.
The slaves in whose cabin Robert had slept.
The slaves he had seen while working.
The families of the slaves he had helped escape.
Every slave he had not met.
Would any of them ever even be free?
His wife's family, except for one of her daughters from before she had met him, was ... where?
Hannah had left a grown daughter and a granddaughter behind. Even with the separation slaves knew might await them daily, knew might well occur when their masters died, knew might occur (for best or worse) one night ... how could a person ever grow accustomed to that?
And now Robert had his mother back, and he had his wife and their daughter and son, and he had one of his wife's two children from before him. He was free, his family was free, he had done right by his mother as much as anyone could dream of, ...
But he had taken the lessons he'd learned as a slave and used them to motivate him to do what he did well.
He'd used those lessons to escape.
And in that sense, he was alone.
Accounts of the time do not indicate if Robert felt what is now called survivor's guilt.
We know it exists. We have felt it. The simple question "Why me?" -- why do we live when others die? -- is all we need to bear in mind to understand the basics of survivor's guilt.
But the psychological understanding of the day was limited. The feelings that result from isolation would first be captured in short fiction by Stephen Crane in The Open Boat some 35 years later. In the story, three people in a boat struggle to make their way to shore. The anxieties of that experience are as much as translated from thought to word. (The brilliance of the book is that the plot is amazingly simple, allowing the author to get into the psyche of separation and have that be the real plot.)
But things like survivor's guilt, post-traumatic stress disorder and even depression were, in Civil War America, probably not known by what doctors would have been around to deal with them in patients like Robert Smalls.
And he was probably the lucky one.
He had been trusted to plan the escape.
Nobody else in the whole crew knew what was going to happen or when it was going to happen. They had been given roughly the notice of "It's time."
They had not been expecting the whirlwind of emotion, so while it was probably more pronounced for them, that part of the psychological toll might not have lasted as long.
Also helping Robert was that he was given what literary critics call agency: He was given important tasks. With these tasks, he could bury himself in work he desperately cared about, but he also could occupy his mind with constructive tasks rather than the lingering questions of what he had left behind -- to what extent he had abandoned his roots.
So he worked.
He helped Union leaders find and disable underwater mines.
He advised high-ranking naval officers on troop and artillery levels, placement and disposition. A week later, by one account, his intelligence on troop placements on the Stono River led to a former Confederate post being taken over by the Union.
And he got to command the ship he'd stolen.
Robert Smalls was the first black man to pilot a ship in United States history. By various accounts, he was piloting the Planter no later than six weeks after turning it over to the Union.
And the other black men who had gone with him were in the Army with him. (By one account, they were in the Army and lent out to the Navy because for full-fledged Naval service, they had to be able to read. According to that account, they could not.)
The historical record contains piles more information on Robert Smalls. As there is more, so will you be given more.
Here we bid adieu to engineers John Smalls (no relation) and Alfred Gradine and crewmen Abraham Jackson, Gabriel Turno, William Morrison (from the Etowah, a steamer), Samuel Chisholm, Abraham Allston and David Jones. Which of them inspired Robert Smalls to plan an escape I cannot determine. One of them did, or many of them did.
Every one of them was needed to get the Planter to safety. In a mission, everyone matters. Everyone has a role to play.
Everyone matters.
Robert knew this. He wouldn't have brought along anyone he didn't trust to make the right decision when it mattered or to get the job done when it absolutely had to be done. Lives and freedom depended on things going the way they needed to go.
Robert believed this was one of several compelling arguments for allowing black Americans to fight and bleed and die for the Union.
And on Aug. 20, 1862, ex-slave and current Army boat pilot Robert Smalls was a passenger on a boat that took him up to see Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to make that case.
Days later, Smalls personally talked to President Lincoln for the second time in four months. Among other things, he said black soldiers would not merely be as good as but would outperform white soldiers because:
they will be fighting for their freedom.
On Aug. 25, 1862, thanks in no small part to Robert Smalls' energy, intelligence and passion, Smalls carried back to General Rufus Saxton an order to form the first black unit in the Union. The order -- for 5,000 escaped slaves from the South -- would never be completely filled, but the seed had been planted:
More than a quarter of a million black Americans would serve in the Union's armed forces.
Robert Smalls had been a slave, a fugitive, a skilled laborer, a boat captain, an emissary to the president and a spy.
He had been shown the evils of slavery and the value of hard work, ingenuity and courage.
He had worked tirelessly in an area he knew as well as anyone. He had risked his life and been rewarded beyond his wildest dreams.
Now he was being told to do something crucial to the war effort that would call upon his personal story and humanity -- but that would test his humility uniquely.
To be continued tomorrow, if I have time.