Robert Smalls

Robert Smalls was born enslaved in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1839 and learned Charleston Harbor as a boatman and wheelman. By 1862 he was piloting the armed Confederate steamer Planter in local waters. On the night of May 13, while white officers were ashore, Smalls and a small Black crew got the Planter underway, took on family members at a prearranged point, steamed past the harbor forts using the ship's own recognition signals, and delivered vessel, guns, and code materials to the Union blockading squadron outside. Navy and War Department paperwork treated the prize as real intelligence and tonnage, not folklore.

Smalls then piloted for the Union Navy and Army transports, including under fire along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, and later commanded the Planter in U.S. service. After Appomattox he sat in the South Carolina legislature and in the U.S. House of Representatives — a political career built on the harbor escape that freed his family and handed the Union a working war steamer.

This register keeps the Civil War act that made the rest possible: date, ship, forts, and delivery to the blockaders. The Brady-Handy portrait from the Library of Congress is public domain. Smalls is not listed as missing; he died in Beaufort in 1915 and is buried there.