Probably Smalls would not have participated, even had the delegation been seated, for in the late spring he had been ordered to Philadelphia with the Planter for a complete overhaul of the vessel. The job took many months. But while in Philadelphia he achieved literacy and became prominent in the work of groups in the city aiding the Port Royal Experiment. He managed also to strike an effective blow against the discrimination suffered by blacks in the ‘City of Brotherly Love.’

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On taking a seat on a streetcar one rainy day, he was ordered by the conductor to move to the outer platform, as then required of blacks by Philadelphia law. Smalls left the car and walked in the rain. The episode was widely publicized. A Union hero had been humiliated. Sentiment grew to eliminate race laws in Philadelphia.

When Union Major General William T. Sherman captured coastal Savannah, Georgia, in December 1864, at the end of his world-famous ‘March to the Sea,’ Smalls and the Planter were kept busy on chores for Sherman’s army as it regrouped for another march northward into the Carolinas. Isolated by that march, Charleston fell to the Union on February 17, 1865. Following along was Robert Smalls, en route to an interesting homecoming, to a confrontation with his past.

A few days after the fall of the city, Smalls brought General Saxton to Charleston, to be greeted by a crowd of cheering blacks. On the outskirts of the crowd stood a few whites. Among them Smalls spotted the original owner of the Planter, his former employer. Pushing through the crowd, Smalls introduced the gentleman to Saxton, an eloquent sign of Smalls’ newfound equality. Two months later, on April 14, the fourth anniversary of the Union’s loss of Fort Sumter, Smalls and the Planter took part in the great ceremony in Charleston Harbor. The old flag was raised again over Sumter. One of a Northern tour party, in describing the scene in the harbor that day, wrote, ‘Almost central in interest, the Planter, crowded almost to suffocation’ with freedmen, was commanded by Smalls, ‘a prince among them, self-possessed, prompt and proud.’

With the war’s end Beaufort became Smalls’ permanent home. Before the war, his former master’s residence, including the quarters where he was born, had been sold to another Carolinian who, during the war, was colonel of a Confederate South Carolina regiment. In 1863 United States tax authorities had put up the property for sale for nonpayment of Federal taxes, and it was acquired by the U.S. Government itself. In 1865 Smalls bought it from the government, and lived there the rest of his life. In postwar years the former owner sued to recover the property, contending that the tax sale was invalid. It was a test case affecting many properties in the South, and it went to the United States Supreme Court. There Smalls’ land title was defended by the solicitor general of the United States and sustained.

In the meantime, Smalls became a political leader in South Carolina. In spring 1867 he helped organize the first Republican Club in that state and soon was on his way to prominence in state offices. Then, in 1874, he was elected as a Republican from the Beaufort district to the United States House of Representatives. In five of the six Congresses between that time and 1887 he served in the House. Thereafter, no black had such a long Congressional tenure until the 1950s. But in 1886 white supremacists finally stole the election from him, and his subsequent contest of the seat, in a House controlled by Democrats, was in vain.

In 1890 Republican President Benjamin Harrison appointed him collector of the Port of Beaufort. With an interruption only during the presidency of Democratic President Grover Cleveland, whose second term followed Harrison’s, Smalls held that post until 1913. Again, Democratic pressure ended his service. But he would not live much longer. He died in 1915. Over and over, between 1876 and 1900, there were proposals in Congress to reward Smalls for his outstanding wartime service. In 1883 a House committee report on one measure told in some detail of that service and branded as ‘absurdly low’ the 1862 appraisal of the Planter and her cargo; it concluded from evidence it had taken that a fair 1862 valuation would have been more than $60,000. In 1897 a special statute provided Smalls a pension of $30 a month, the pension at the time for a U.S. Navy captain. That did not still Congressional agitation. Finally, in 1900, Congress adopted the statute providing Smalls be paid $5,000, less the amount paid him under the 1862 law. Many then and now believe he received no more than his due.

This article was written by Howard Westwood and originally appeared in the May 1986 issue of Civil War Times. For more great articles, be sure to subscribe to Civil War Times magazine today!

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