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.
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?
Robert Smalls was of great tangible value to the Union because of the information he had about Confederate troops and strategy and the coastal area in which he had been working for many years.
But having the knowledge to win and having the public support necessary to maintain the war effort are not always intertwined. And while many slaves had escaped North -- and they would help fill the order for 5,000 escaped slaves for the 1st South Carolina Volunteers -- they did not speak with the passion and intelligence of Robert Smalls.
And while Robert counted his verbal intellect among his talents, his primary interest was in continuing the Naval service that had seen him take part in four engagements in two months. In that service he had been at home mentally -- in familiar places, doing to a greater extent what he had done before the war: trying to secure his freedom.
He wanted to be one of the guys.
He wanted to be on his boat, helping the Union cause. On his boat, or talking to Du Pont, or recruiting former slaves for combat service, could he be most effective.
He had escaped for freedom, not fame.
Robert talked to Admiral Du Pont, who senses his worry. His advice was spot on: Robert would be welcome back on the Planter if he wanted his job back when his trip was done. And in the 19th-century way of saying things, he told Robert that if he did not forget where he had come from, he would be treated, when he came back, as he had been treated before.
So it was decided. Robert and his wife and son would go up to New York for a week for what amounted to a working vacation/celebrity tour -- away from the forts and rivers Robert knew well, with speaking engagements, recruitment events and awards planned.
Change had followed Robert like a faithful dog all of his life, and its fidelity would only deepen here.
If he felt bad about leaving his Navy friends in early September, he adapted quite well to being in the North. He was received, if anything, more warmly here than he had been even by the president. Here his job was to walk around being Robert Smalls.
With his typical modesty, he told the story of his escape to black audiences looking to celebrate a national hero as few other groups could. Du Pont and Lincoln had been grateful because of what Robert's effort meant for the war.
But freedmen and escaped slaves were grateful because of how the story touched them personally. Because of how the escape and the escapees touched their hearts.
Here he could be around people who understood his heart. They knew he was not looking for an audience with the president when he escaped; he was demonstrating his intrinsic intelligence and asserting his fundamental humanity.
Eleven days after an editorial in the New York Daily Tribune heralded his arrival in New York, permission for a longer stay was requested.
He was a star.
Four days after that, President Lincoln announced that slaves in Confederate states would be free on the first day of the next year. Even amid uncertainty over if that would happen, the vision of all slaves freed combined with the personal appearance of a former slave who had freed himself could not but inspire everyone who supported the perpetual and present cause of freedom.
Four days after that, another letter of permission. The trip had gone better than anyone could have expected.
Six days after that, Robert attended a talk given by an abolitionist in the practically effervescing wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. The event was as much about his escape aboard the Planter as it was about anything else.
It can thus hardly be surprising that Robert, bathing deservedly in this fame offered soulfully and spiritedly by people who shared a captive past with him, stayed in New York for more than a month.
Would not any of us have done the same?
Where Du Pont had been grateful for Robert's contribution to the war effort, the trip to new York offered Robert the chance to be among his own and to use his hard-earned gains to benefit his cause in ways that validated him.
He had been in the military service of men who were fighting to keep him and his family enslaved. He had been helping men who supported the notion of buying a person -- no. Buying a subhuman. Using a subhuman.
Now he was leading the charge to improve the military service charged with defeating those who believed in the business of buying and selling him and his family.
He had been among white men who respected his skill on a boat. But he had been around such men before his home state seceded.
Here he was among white men who celebrated his daring adventure and advocated for the freedom of all slaves and an end to slavery.
He had been among black men and women who dreamed of being free.
Here he was among the free.
Here he was able to rally former slaves to the Union's cause -- to use his story of escape to encourage support for what was effectively his cause -- former slaves taking up arms and doing just as he had done:
Earning their freedom.
Here he had time alone with his wife and young son.
He had been closer to his master than most. Many slaves grew up with no father figure. His father figure had gotten him out of jail too many times to count. Now he had delivered his infant son from life as a slave.
Here he could embrace his humanity every which way. He was in the company of men who not only wanted the Confederacy to lose, and who not only wanted the Union to win, but who wanted Robert and every slave he had ever known or seen to be free.
Where President Lincoln had listened to his story and marveled at his intelligence, here crowds cheered him, packed buildings to see his face, celebrated him as an ambassador of all American black people.
Where Du Pont or other Union military men might have discussed the strategic or morale advantages of capturing Charleston, Robert mentioned it in the context of not just his cause but his life. Were he to return to Charleston, it would mean the Union had won and he would be home.
Free.
Here he could begin to understand more fully the scope of his abilities. He had not been trained as a public speaker as he had been trained to navigate South Carolina's coastal waters, but all that was required of him was to talk about his escape, answer admirers' questions and make a similar case to blacks to enlist as he had made to Lincoln.
Here his desire to be free would be all but unbridled. His eyes were filled with the sights of free black men and women and children; his ears were filled with the words of white men advocating freedom for all and black men saying they wished to follow his lead and join the Union, which would now have them fight for the freedom of their southern brothers and sisters; his soul was filled with the social justice he had demanded as a teen; and at the end of each day, he was left to the company of his wife and son and to the knowledge that the next day would bring action as important as any he could lead aboard the Planter and as safe as safe could be.
And here a seed was planted that would bloom into a tree to rival few in its day.
But all things must pass.
History has forgotten what finally pried Robert, Hannah and Robert Jr. Smalls from the most grateful and welcoming hearts and hands of New York.
And so on Oct. 31, 1862, Robert and his wife and son landed in South Carolina.
They were met by Du Pont and an aide.
Like a displeased father who does not want to seem critical of his son's success but does want his son to know he disapproves of the way he has handled it, Du Pont did not speak. His aide spoke for him, expressing that disappointment.
Robert assured Du Pont that at all times during his trip to New York, he had remembered his true duty and his home.
By various accounts, Robert piloted the Planter in at least 17 engagements with the Union. To recount even a few here would push this tale to a seventh or an eighth part. Suffice to say, Robert served with distinction and was rewarded in kind. One brief account will serve as an example:
Less than a year after the Planter had been stolen away from the Confederacy and delivered to the Union, it was used in an attack on Fort Sumter. The attack failed. By one account, the commander of the ship tried to surrender to the Confederacy.
That account states that Robert was worried he and the other black crewmembers of the Planter would not be treated as prisoners of war. Given the $4,000 reward for Robert's safe return and the morale coup to the North (and boon to the South), it seems unlikely that Robert would have been shunted off to a camp for prisoners of war.
We will never know what the Confederacy would have done with Robert had they gotten him back. He took command of the ship and powered it back to safety.
By one account, Robert was promoted to captain of the ship instantly. He was the first black captain of an American ship.
He would retain that position until the war was over. And his standing nationally and locally would grow.
But far more importantly, he again had two children. On the day on which he was promoted to captain, his wife gave birth to their second daughter.
His promotion and her birth would be celebrated every year.
Now it was 1864, and the beginning of an election year. Robert's home state, South Carolina, picked him as one of four black delegates (and 12 white delegates, for 16 total) to the Republican National Convention. He would not be able to attend.
In 1865, with the war winding down, Robert Smalls piloted the Planter back to Charleston -- the city having been captured -- to raise the American flag.
Awaiting the Planter was a throng of black people and scant whites. Robert went shore with General Rufus Saxton -- who had helped organize the First South Carolina Volunteers, and to whom Robert had given that order from Stanton -- and was received as a hero.
In among the whites was the ship's original owner. Smalls moved to introduce Saxton to Ferguson. As reported by Boston abolitionist newspaper The Commonwealth:
Small[s] was in the midst of [some black people], with a couple of white men in conversation with him. Curiosity led us [the reporter] near. He introduced us to the builder of the vessel, and the maker of the engine and boilers. "I put the polish on," he added, laughing. They withdrew towards a couple of their own complexion. He pointed out the principal person in the group, to the General, as Col. Ferguson, the original owner of the Planter, and of all her old hands, except Small[s]. His owner did not show himself.
The war would end.
Lincoln would be assassinated.
Saxton would attempt to give freed black slaves if not 40 acres and a mule, at least the land they had worked as slaves.
Because of this effort, President Andrew Johnson would remove him from his position with the Freedmen's Bureau.
The Planter would be sold -- some say to Ferguson -- and lost in 1876.
And Robert would need a job.
To be continued tomorrow, if I have time.