Although writers in later years said Smalls became an officer either in the navy or army, the fact was that he remained a civilian throughout the conflict. But his was a military career just the same. Though there were cases where civilians on hire as pilots, engineers, or otherwise, presented discipline problems, Smalls always took orders exactly as if he had been an enrolled seaman or soldier.

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Early in his work with the Union’s armed forces, it was foreshadowed that much more than military service was in store for the one-time slave. With the flight of whites from the Port Royal area following the Union’s invasion, means had to be devised to support thousands of slaves, ‘contrabands,’ remaining behind. What evolved, in the spring of 1862, was a program known to history as the ‘Port Royal Experiment.’ A devoted corps of Northern missionaries, teachers, and business managers, under the aegis of the U.S. Treasury Department and backed by the military, came to organize and lead blacks to a self-sustaining, free existence on plantations around the urban center of Beaufort. Prominent in that program was the Reverend Mansfield French. He saw that Smalls’ dramatic theft of the Planter and the fame that followed made him a potential asset to the experiment. He immediately proposed that Smalls be sent to New York City for meetings at the Cooper Institute. There, the mayor would preside, to ‘raise money for the contrabands’ to help meet their needs on the plantations.

Du Pont vetoed that proposal. Just then, there was preempting need for Smalls on the water approaches to Charleston. But a few weeks later, in August 1862, Smalls was sent to Washington with French to deliver a plea from the military governor of the Port Royal area, Brigadier General Rufus Saxton, to permit him to arm black workmen on the plantations for protection from Rebel raids. On that mission Smalls met both Union Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and President Abraham Lincoln. He also had a long session with Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, who, at the time, had the responsibility for properties abandoned by their owners in Union-occupied areas of the South. The mission was a notable success; French and Smalls returned in early September with authorization for Saxton to help enroll black men as Union soldiers, the first such authority ever given by the U.S. War Department.

No sooner was that mission completed than Smalls was off again with French, this time to New York City with his family. There Smalls was a drawing card at meetings to solicit support for the Port Royal Experiment. A high point of that trip was a huge meeting at the Shiloh Church on October 2. The next morning’s New York Times, headlined ‘The Hero of the Planter,’ reported the house crowded with ‘the most intelligent and respectable portion of the Afro-Americans of the great Metropolis.’ A choir sang ‘John Brown’s Hymn,’ ‘There’s A Better Time a-Coming,’ and other emancipation songs. At Smalls’ entrance with his family the crowd went wild. He was presented with a gold medal, embossed with a view of the Planter on the way from Fort Sumter to the blockaders. A resolution was adopted, hailing Smalls’ feat as proof of the’safety, justice and easy possibility’ of immediate, universal emancipation. It was a critical time for the nation’s blacks. The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation had just been issued, but it remained uncertain whether it would be made final and how far it would extend.

During the next year and a half, along with his notable service in the military, Smalls steadily grew in the esteem of the Port Royal community. In May 1864 a meeting of freedmen and whites in Beaufort selected a delegation to represent South Carolina at the Republican National Convention in Baltimore, Maryland. Of the 16 delegates, four were blacks. Of those four, one was Smalls. Though the delegation was not officially recognized at the convention, it is significant that the first political voice for blacks in South Carolina acclaimed Smalls.

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