Robert Smalls
So I'm one of those dumb, masochistic, self-hating idiots out there who still hasn't found the balls or the good sense to purge all social media off of every device I own with a Mad Max flamethrower guitar like I'm Leonardo DiCaprio hosing down Nazis that have been infected by some kind of fucked-up mutated flesh-eating coronavirus, and, if you're in the same boat as me, doomed forever to wander the earth being pissed off at your fucking phone because some dipshit you never met before decided to wallpaper the comments section of a funny cat video with a bunch of wildly-uninformed nonsense that is so incoherent, erroneous, and hateable that it fills you with the wild uncontrolled rage of a thousand exploding suns, then there's a fairly high likelihood that you had a crudely-memed photo of a guy named Robert Smalls posted on your feed at some point over the last year or so… probably accompanied by some condescending comment about how this guy doesn't have a movie yet but they gave ones to Pikachu, Jai Courtney, and the Sonic the Hedgehog Cinematic Universe. So, ok, yeah, I guess I'm also pretty goddamn tired of the Hollywood rebooting Batman 1989 and Terminator 2 every six months and soullessly recycling every IP on Earth to the point where I now actively fucking despise everything from the 80s and 90s that I ever actually used to like, but I'm also not typically a huge fan of that that thing where some "well actually" dipshit killdozes his way into a conversation nobody invited him to and starts yelling at you about how it's illegal to like a thing because there's actually this other thing you didn't know about that's better.
But, in this case, they’re right. Robert Smalls is The Shit. So it's probably time we talk about him.
"My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. It proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life."
Robert Smalls was born into slavery on a big plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina, on April 5th, 1839. His mother was a slave, and his father is a bit of a mystery – most guesses involve the son of the guy who owned the plantation, but the only real clue pointing to anything is that someone from 150 years ago once wrote that he “looked mulatto” (I’m not getting that from the photos, but what do I know), and the truth is that we honestly don't know for sure and it doesn’t matter to the story at all anyways. Smalls was raised by his mom in the plantation house, and she made sure that he got out into the fields to witness the true horrors of slavery first-hand — she had been taken from her parents when she was seven, and she didn’t want Smalls to forget it, and by the time he was old enough to punch shit he was understandably pretty pissed off about the whole existence of the institution in general. At the age of 12 he was arrested by Charleston PD for the heinous crime of being outside after 7pm (he'd been hanging out with his white friends and didn't feel like coming home early just because he was the only one with dark skin) and Robert's mom started getting a little anxious maybe that her kid was getting a little too Public Enemy for life on the Plantation. She helped arrange for Robert to be "leased out" to work on the docks in Charleston, a fucked-up arrangement where the kid would bust his ass ten hours a day rigging ships and moving heavy shit around only to watch 95% of his salary go right back to his owners on the farm. But, whatever, Robert Smalls didn't complain, and for the next five years he kept his head down and worked his balls off, eventually moving up to work as a sailor and deckhand on board commercial steamers heading in and out of Charleston Harbor. He fell in love a woman who worked at one of the hotels on the docks (it probably didn’t hurt that he's got kind of a Childish Gambino thing going on in that first photo up there), got married, rented an apartment, and had two kids, all while bringing home just $1 a week of his wages and somehow living off of that.
But, of course, happily married life wasn't really all that chill for enslaved couples in Charleston in 1856, because not only was Robert Smalls a slave, but so was his wife, and both their kids were born into slavery as well. Which meant that at any moment, either Robert's owner or his wife's owner could decide to sell either of them, or their kids, and there wasn't a damn thing anyone could do about any of that. Since that is obviously super fucked-up, Smalls went to his wife's owner and asked to buy her freedom, and that dickhead was like, "yeah, no problem, I'll give you your wife and kids for $800".
At a dollar a week, it was going to take a while, but Robert Smalls started planning and saving.
Then the Civil War started. And the first shots were fired so close to Robert Smalls that he could probably see the explosions at Fort Sumter from his apartment's bedroom window.
Smalls was 22 years old when the war started, and since he had like a decade of experience rigging, sailing, and working on ships, he was immediately pressed into service about the CSS Planter, a converted cotton steamer that was now working as a supply ship ferrying food, ammo, and other supplies from the Charlestown docks to the various forts that defended the harbor. He technically wasn't allowed to be appointed the ship's pilot, because that job could only go to a white person, so Smalls was appointed "wheelman", which is functionally the exact same thing as pilot and the only real difference is that Wheelman sounds more gangster and evokes mental images of dudes in sunglasses pulling badass handbrake turns in expensive supercharged Italian sportscars.
So Smalls worked on the crew of the Planter, and even though he did his job with expert professionalism he also never lost sight of the fact that it was super fucked-up that he was risking his life every day to fight a war where victory meant continued slavery for himself and his entire family. So, as he made his rounds sailing between all of Charleston Harbor's forts, he started making mental notes – troop placements, currents, tides, and, most importantly, signals and codes sent between the ship and the forts that dotted the harbor.
For the next nine months he waited, watched, and gathered intel. Every time he left port, he told his wife to pack a bag and be ready to bolt at a moment's notice.
Robert Smalls was planning one of the most insanely-dangerous and badass escapes anyone had ever attempted. He just needed to wait for the right moment.
And, one quiet night in May of 1862, he found that moment.
The CSS Planter's crew and officers where white, but Robert Smalls and seven other slaves also worked aboard the vessel. Well, on the night of May 13, 1862, after a long shift ferrying supplies and weapons, the ship put in at one of the little islands in the harbor for the night. At 2am, the exhausted captain ordered his crew to make camp on the beach and grab some sleep. Smalls offered to remain on the boat with the other slaves, and keep the ship prepped in case they needed to leave in a hurry.
As soon as the crew and captain were asleep, he fucking stole the steamboat.
These things are not quiet – it's got a big-ass charcoal boiler in it – but Smalls still somehow got his crew to slip it out undetected, and then he bolted directly back to Charleston. This, of course, would be certain death if he was captured – certainly the Confederate Navy didn't have a lot of tolerance for slave mutineers – but Smalls didn't give a fuck. He landed at port, and him and his crew ran to get their families. Then, moments later, 17 escaped slaves re-boarded the ship and slipped out again.
Freedom was ten miles away, with at least five Confederate forts standing between these desperate escapees and the open water.
“When we drew near the fort every man but Robert Smalls felt his knees giving way. The women began crying and praying.”
Smalls assembled his makeshift crew, and his first order was for them to load the six cannons on board Planter. He was going to try to talk his way through the Confederate checkpoints, but, if discovered, he was going to fight his ship for as long as he could. If defeat seemed certain, he had one man stationed in the boiler to blow the ship. This was going to be a one-way trip out of Charleston harbor, either sailing to freedom or being vaporized in the process. Nobody on the ship was going back to the life they'd just escaped. They were going to die free.
The first couple checkpoints went smoothly. The darkness of the early morning helped, as well as the fact that Smalls had literally piloted this ship on these routes dozens of times already. He knew the signals to call (two long whistles and a short), the orders he could say, and he wore a big-ass hat to try and hide his face to avoid any unwanted questions.
Robert Smalls somehow talked his way past five Confederate security checkpoints while piloting a ship crewed by 17 slaves, many of them women and children, by convincing the sentries that he was on a mission to run the Union blockade and deliver weapons to nearby Rebel camps.
It worked.
It wasn't until he slipped the final blockade that the sentries figured out what was going on. The sound of alarm bells and whistles alerted behind him, but Smalls and his crew fed the boiler and outran their pursuit – directly to the Union Blockade. The Union frigate that encountered him almost opened fire, until they looked through their scope and saw a white flag flying high above the Planter and seventeen happy people dancing on the decks.
When Robert Smalls was pulled aboard the Federal ship, he basically said, "Good morning sir, I've brought you some of your guns back."
For almost single-handedly saving 17 people and delivering a six-gun warship to the Union, Robert Smalls was immediately hailed as a hero in the North. He made national news, his story is sometimes credited with being part of the reason why the Union started allowing black soldiers into the Army, and Smalls personally went on a speaking tour throughout the Northern states trying to recruit black soldiers to fight in the war (he is credited with securing the enrollment of 5,000 African-American soldiers).
But Smalls didn't want to talk. He wanted to fucking fight.
And, less than a year after he fled Charleston Harbor, he went back – at the head of a warship. The USS Planter, the same damn ship he'd just stolen from his enemies.
Commissioned as an officer in the United States military, Robert Smalls participated in 17 naval military actions in and around Charleston Harbor between 1863 and 1865. He piloted a US Navy Ironclad, the USS Keokuk, during the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1863, and earned a commendation for bravery at the Battle of Folly Creek in June while piloting the Planter – the ship's captain got a little shell-shocked from the heavy fire the ship was taking and ran to hide in the boiler room, so Smalls took over active command and helped his crew fight off the enemy attack. He was promoted to captain, earned a salary of $150 a month (making him among the highest-paid black soldiers of the Civil War), and watched proudly from the deck of the Planter when Charleston surrendered to the Union in April 1865.
After the war, Robert Smalls was appointed Brigadier General of the South Carolina militia, and he took his wife and kids back home to Beaufort.
Literally.
As in, he bought the house where he was born.
He let his former owners live there with him, because Smalls was a chill guy, and he opened a store, opened a school for black students, and started a newspaper called the Southern Standard. He was elected first to the South Carolina State Senate, then was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1874 after winning 80% of the vote from his district. And, like, holy shit right? The dude stole a warship from this town, used that same ship to attack the forts defending the town, and then 80% of the people in that town voted to send him to Congress for it. That's pretty badass.
Well, not everyone was all pumped up about Representative Smalls. And, in 1877, the guy he beat for the seat orchestrated some bullshit scandal where they accused Smalls of taking bribes while he was working in the State Senate. He was sent to court in Charleston, given a joke trial, convicted, and sentenced to three years in jail, but only ended up serving two days before the Governor of South Carolina pardoned him because this whole thing was just a lame political maneuver. Even Congress thought it was bullshit, and Smalls didn't even lose his seat in the House over it — he just walked out of jail and went right back to the House of Representatives. He went on to serve three more terms in Congress, where he worked to desegregate the military, restaurants, and railroads, fought for debt relief for Southern families who had lost their homes and property during the War, battled for voting rights for black people, and fought the Klan and their allies in every arena they presented themselves. Hell, at the age of 73 the dude stopped a lynch mob from killing a kid in the streets near his house by walking right up to the mob's leader and telling that asshole that if they killed that kid then Smalls would rally every black person in Charleston and burn the entire fucking city to the ground. Which, for the record, is how you handle that sort of thing when you’re a badass.
After serving five terms in Congress, Robert Smalls went home, worked for a bit as the Customs Collector at Charleston port, and died at his home in 1915 at the age of 75. His home is now a national landmark, his name is on a couple schools in South Carolina, and in 2004 he became the first African-American to have a US warship named after him – the support ship USAV Major General Robert Smalls. Not bad work for a kid born into slavery whose primary goal was to live in a world where he didn’t have to worry about his wife or kids being forcibly ripped out of his home due to circumstances beyond his control.
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