'One of the most heroic acts of the war,' reported the New York Times on May 19, 1862. Later, the commander of the Union navy along the South Atlantic coast, Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, pronounced it 'one of the coolest and most gallant naval acts of war.' Nor was it forgotten in postwar years.

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In 1900, the U.S. Congress recorded it in a statute, providing a reward for the hero of the episode. The statute read: '…Robert Smalls, on the thirteenth day of May, eighteen hundred and sixty-two, did capture the steamer Planter, with all the armament and ammunition for Fort Ripley, at the city of Charleston, taking her out and turning her over to the Federal blockading squadron off Charleston….' And in recent years the memory of Smalls' feat was freshened in South Carolina: the state government placed a marker, reciting the act, at a churchyard in Beaufort, where Smalls is buried. But back in May 1862 Robert Smalls was a 23-year-old illiterate slave. Early on the morning of May 13, 1862, the Confederate commander at Charleston, South Carolina, Brigadier General Roswell S. Ripley, was astounded to learn his dispatch boat had disappeared. That boat, the Planter, for many months under charter to the army with a civilian crew, had been doing good service on critical missions-inspection, charting, transport-as General Ripley prepared to meet possible Union assault on Charleston, the cradle of the rebellion. The evening before, May 12, she had been moored, as usual, at the wharf just in front of Ripley's headquarters. Where was she now? The general could find no one who knew. The regular 20-man guard had been posted at the wharf during the night, with sentinels a few paces from the boat. They knew only that the Planter had moved off about 3:30 a.m. At her rail had been a man who seemed to be her captain, for he had the captain's posture and wore his straw hat and jacket. A Confederate banner and a Palmetto flag had been flying. The Planter was scheduled for an early morning chore, so the move seemed quite normal.

But now it was found that the captain had not been with the Planter. He and his two brother officers had spent the night ashore. They had no idea what happened. The boat had eight crewmen, all slaves. Robert Smalls was the chief crewman, the wheelman; had he been white he would have been called the pilot. Smalls and all but one of the crewmen were missing. The remaining slave knew nothing.

Anxiously, Confederate officers peered out at the forms of Union blockading ships at sea, well beyond Charleston Harbor's Confederate bastion, Fort Sumter. At first incredulous, finally they were convinced. There was the Planter, riding between two of the Union blockaders. General Ripley, furious, ordered an aide to find out how she got there.

The aide's report disclosed little. The boat had moved slowly to a nearby wharf, stopped briefly, whistled, and then turned into the harbor. She had reached Fort Sumter at about 4:15 a.m., where she was reported to the officer of the day. He, thinking her the guard boat, gave her the signal to pass. And so she had gone on into the outer harbor. It was said that during the evening three whites-two men and a woman-had boarded her at the wharf and had not been seen to leave. Though this proved untrue, it did start a long-persisting rumor, amplified by an outraged Southern press, that Union agents had turned the trick.

In the Rebel capital, Richmond, Virginia, government officials were promptly informed of the loss. Confederate General Robert E. Lee opined that the responsible parties should be punished. General Ripley had already preferred charges. The Planter's officers and men had been arrested, to be tried by court-martial, for violating a general order decreeing officers of vessels moored at the wharves were to remain aboard.

Loss of the Planter could not be shrugged off. Some 10 days before, Ripley's barge had been spirited out to the Union fleet by slave crewmen; that had been only an annoyance. The Planter, however, was not a mere barge. She was a steam-powered side-wheeler. A shallow-draft craft, built as a cotton transport with capacity for 1,400 bales, she ideally suited herself to moving troops and materiel along South Carolina's labyrinth of coastal waters. Now it appeared that the troops she moved would be Federals.

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