The war had ended.
Lincoln was assassinated.
Saxton attempted 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 removed him from his position with the Freedmen's Bureau.
The Planter was sold -- some say to Ferguson -- and lost in 1876.
And Robert needed a job.
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?
With his service to the Union military completed, Robert Smalls needed a job.
He also needed a home.
He would get that and more. In a whirlwind of achievement that by now could not really surprise Robert -- he had gone from slave to Union hero in less than a day and had gotten his country's president to approve of using black soldiers -- he:
Bought the home he had lived in as a slave. (His mother moved in with him.)
Was made officially, completely and utterly free by the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment.
Gained the right to vote.
Started a business.
And ... one more very small thing.
Perhaps because he was a dreamer, perhaps because his mother had raised him to think he was as good as anyone else (but no better), perhaps because he had found that serving his country strongly benefited him and it, he ran for the South Carolina House of Representatives.
And he won.
And for once, he was not in the minority: According to one source, ex-slaves made up 56 percent of the Legislature.
State Rep. Robert Smalls, R-Beaufort, served his party and his people by helping to establish the state's first Republican club. He also bought land for a school and tried to open state schools up to state citizens.
All of them.
For free.
without charge to all classes of persons.
And Robert then became state Sen. Robert Smalls, R-Beaufort, and then U.S. Rep. Robert Smalls, R-Beaufort.
And he tried to desegregate the military.
All of it.
He was forced out of office in 1877 on what most records suggest were trumped-up charges motivated not by concern for his ability to serve but his ability to be white.
The military would not be desegregated until 1948 on paper and much later in practice.
Voting rights that had been extended to him 12 years before were now curtailed. They would not be fully restored to blacks until the 1960s -- almost 90 years later. (While I doubt he was denied the right to vote -- trying to sneak a literacy test past him would probably not have gone well -- it seems almost a surety that black friends and colleagues were not nearly so lucky.)
The education he sought for all Americans would not begin to be realized until 1954 -- more than 80 years after he tried.
Fifty-six years later, we're not there yet.
But we're working on it.
All of it.
Robert had only ever done what was in the best interests of his country. Even his repeated jailings only called attention to the lack of equality in America.
And now he had again been targeted because of his race, not because he was unfit for office.
Some men would have retired to the company of those not specifically out to get them.
Some would have rested on their accomplishments. Had he begun an extensive speaking tour, who could have blamed him? I would have written about it as a great undertaking -- seeking to further the cause of racial equality and the advancement of minorities in America by promoting personal responsibility and achievement (as so many people have done).
Robert instead went back to work, but only after securing a pardon from the governor or South Carolina.
The governor of the state was one William Dunlap Simpson, a Democrat.
Simpson had served in the Confederate States House of Representatives.
Robert would be the U.S. Collector of Customs for 20 years. In that time, Booker T. Washington would become the first black person to dine at the White House.
He retired in 1911, two years before Woodrow Wilson was elected president.
He might not have lasted long in Wilson's pro-segregation government anyway. But Robert turned 72 in 1911.
Harriet Tubman would die less than two years later in a home for elderly blacks in New York.
Sojourner Truth, who was his mother's age, had died in 1883.
And Robert would have three more birthdays.
He would live to see two of his children start families. Those families began other families. Today, by one source's word, there are 75 direct descendants of Robert Smalls.
You should not have learned this from me.
I should not have learned of this while looking for something else. (I still haven't found it, but I stopped looking for the most part.)
This story should be known. Everywhere. People should be compared to Robert Smalls. People should aspire to win the Robert Smalls Courage Award.
There should have been a movie decades ago. Imagine the job Sidney Poitier could have done. Imagine that presence playing that man as the Planter headed toward the Onward flying a bedsheet.
Imagine that presence saying to an escaped slave in New York, "I'll go back to Charleston when I'm leading the Union in invading it."
Imagine that presence defending his honor when faced with charges of bribery. When arguing for the desegregation of the military and the free education of all Americans.
We should be imagining back to it, not imagining what might be.
You should not have learned this from me.
It is not the fault of the people who teach our history if they were not told this story.
It is not the fault of the people who write the history books if they could not find it anywhere, if they did not know to look.
It is not the fault of the people who teach their children history if they had never heard it before in their lives.
But somewhere, someone has dropped a ball that can now be picked back up.
The wonderful thing about our government is that it listens to us if we are loud enough.
There is no reason for the government to not have an award or a day or a scholarship or a memorial federal seat (focusing on minority rights, though it could be any of a number of issues) or a courthouse or a barracks or a hospital or ... something more than a ship I swear I don't remember being commissioned in 2004.
We have things in Robert Smalls' memory. The trouble is that nobody knows about them.
This is our chance to change that.
So in the comments, tell me what we should do. Bear in mind that it should be big and loud and relate to his (numerous) accomplishments.
For Josephine Butler, several days ago (eons ago in Internet years), I did an annotated list of sources.
I would like to be finished with this before I am 75 (some 40-plus years from now), so here is everything I consulted:
http://cgi.ebay.com/... (the abolitionist newspaper)
http://books.google.com/...
http://www.historynet.com/...
http://www.history.navy.mil/...
http://telegraph.civilwar.org/...
http://books.google.com/...
http://civilwargazette.wordpress.com/... (original correspondence)
http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/... (original correspondence)
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://www.history.navy.mil/...
http://www.robertsmalls.com/...
http://robertsmalls.org/...
http://www.factasy.com/...
http://www.sonofthesouth.net/... (original reporting)
http://www.factasy.com/...
http://www.sharenews.com/...
http://www.cowanauctions.com/...
And various pages on Saxton, Relyea and others that I've since closed. Not hard to find, any of them. Nothing controversial posited by any of them. (Sorry if I seem a bit lazy, but I have been keeping track of that many tabs in my browser since Part 3.)