Tuesday, May 15, 2012 2:24:38 AM
Robert Smalls’s Great Escape
Robert Smalls and the Planter, from Harper’s Weekly
Library of Congress
By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE
May 12, 2012, 5:45 pm
As elite Charlestonians slept unaware in the lavish mansions of the Confederacy’s spiritual capital, a slave — a mulatto man trusted by both his owners and employers — executed a daring plot that struck at the core of the white Southern imagination.
In the early morning of Tuesday, May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls, the wheelman of the Planter, commandeered the former cotton steamer turned Confederate supply boat. His plan: to sail through the harbor, beyond Confederate fortifications, to the Union blockade — to freedom. On board were the rest of the enslaved crew and nearly a dozen other bondspeople, including Smalls’s wife and two children.
He and his co-conspirators had certainly planned their mission well. As Smalls had predicted, the Planter’s white officers, tired from a week’s absence from the city, ignored Confederate naval policy requiring that one officer stay with the ship and went ashore for the evening. Smalls also took to heart a remark made by one of his fellow crewman — “Boy, you look jes like de captain” — and donned the white skipper’s naval jacket and trademark straw hat. Aided by the disguise and the dusky light of the early morning, Smalls gambled that he could pass for the officer once the Planter reached Fort Sumter, which would have to grant the boat permission to leave the harbor.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, was Smalls’s knowledge of his trade and the waters of Charleston Harbor. A skilled sailor since childhood, Smalls had spent the past few years working on boats that served the city’s bustling port, passing on a portion of his pay to his permissive master. In the summer of 1861, he had accepted a job aboard the Planter, which had been commissioned by the Confederacy to help defend Charleston. He thus knew the signals the boat would have to use to pass Fort Sumter, and he knew where the mines were, since he himself had laid them.
Still, it was an audacious undertaking. Should they be caught, Smalls acknowledged to his wife, the outcome was assured. “I shall be shot,” he stated matter-of-factly.
But the plan worked. The sentinel at Fort Sumter answered the ship’s signal with the cry, “Pass the Planter,” and Smalls and his crew barreled ahead toward the Union blockade. The ship announced its friendly intentions by removing the Confederate flag for a white bed sheet. Realizing they had made it, the slaves on board, according to the captain of the Union ship Onward, flocked to the deck, “some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking toward Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it.” Upon meeting the captain, Smalls revealed that freedom had not been his only goal. “I thought the Planter,” he wryly offered, “might be of some use to Uncle Abe.”
Smalls’s feat caught Northerners and Southerners off guard. In the North, Smalls was hailed as a hero, and his courageous scheme spoke to one of the most pressing policy debates of the war, persuading some reluctant Northerners that blacks would indeed don a blue uniform and fight for their liberty. A Pennsylvania Congressman argued that the incident proved that blacks had “enterprise, energy, and capacity, and may be trusted to go it alone.” It was no surprise, then, that Union General David Hunter, who advocated arming former slaves, sent Smalls as part of a delegation to convince President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton of the wisdom of this course later that summer.
But in the Confederacy, the story was a bitter pill to swallow. “Our community was intensely agitated Tuesday morning,” reported the Charleston Daily Courier on May 14. Smalls had deprived the upstart nation of precious commodities — 17 former bondspeople and a gunboat that Smalls claimed was worth $30,000 — while providing the Union Navy with essential intelligence about the waterways surrounding Charleston. More generally, the Planter incident offered an unsettling answer to a question that Southern slaveholders had been wrestling with for much of the 19th century: Were slaves faithful servants or enemies in their midst?
Many Old South planters labored under the delusion that slavery was a domestic institution governed by familial rather than market values. Positing themselves as benevolent patriarchs, they claimed to provide for the material and spiritual needs of their “black family” just as they did for their “white family.” “God in his good Providence has brought these heathen to our very doors,” insisted a writer in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1848. “In our dwellings … devolve upon us obligations and duties as solemn and responsible as those we owe to our children.”
A curious admixture of Christian stewardship, white supremacy and self-interest, this paternalist ethos promised to pay moral and practical dividends for Southern society. Since humanely treated slaves were healthier, lived longer and thus produced far more rice, cotton, sugar and tobacco, planters could attend to the Christian responsibility to guide their uncivilized charges as they lined their pockets.
And as the abolitionist chorus grew louder in the 1830s, paternalism also made for good sectional propaganda. Southern politicians and theorists like James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh contrasted the cold calculus of the free-market North with the tender bonds that knit together the plantation South. Although few paternalists practiced what they preached — slave families, for instance, were regularly broken up at the auction block — many nonetheless held fast to the notion that their slaves were loyal members of their plantation family.
Yet to a second group of slaveholders, this was utter nonsense. Paternalism, they argued, was a poor substitute for a firm hand when it came to managing the enslaved. When slaves disobeyed, ran away or threatened rebellion, these anti-paternalists pointed the finger at indulgent masters, who gave their slaves too many liberties and privileges, and evangelical missionaries, who sought to nurture Christian faith by teaching the enslaved to read and write.
In Charleston, for example, free black and enslaved members of the city’s African Methodist Episcopal congregation had plotted a slave uprising in 1822. James Hamilton Jr., the city attendant and future governor of South Carolina, blamed the “misguided benevolence” of local slaveholders for the thwarted uprising, led by Denmark Vesey. He noted that its “ringleaders” were among “the most humanely treated negroes in the city.” In response to the Vesey scare, the state cracked down on the few liberties afforded free blacks and slaves. In the meantime, Charleston shored up its defenses against insurrection, beginning work on the Citadel, a formidable arsenal in the center of the city, which would eventually become the home of the South Carolina Military Academy.
Nevertheless, paternalism remained a powerful influence in Charleston and across the South through the Civil War. Southerners ruled their slaveholding society through force and coercion on the one hand, and indulgence and negotiation on the other. A paternalist faith in slave loyalty was nowhere more evident than in the white crew’s decision to leave Smalls and his enslaved colleagues on the Planter while they went ashore for the evening.
Smalls’s escape, like countless less famous episodes over the course of the war, undoubtedly dispelled many masters’ illusions about the devotion of their human chattel. Yet even after thousands of slaves ran away behind Union lines, and thousands more followed Smalls into armed service against the Confederacy, some slaveholders remained blinded by the paternalist ethos. In May 1865, just months after black Charlestonians had paraded through the streets of the city celebrating their liberation, a local planter named Henry William Ravenel wrote of his slaves, “As they always been faithful and attached to us, and have been raised as family servants, and have all of them been in our family for several generations, there is a feeling towards them somewhat like that of a father.”
Robert Smalls, for his part, remained an enemy in the midst of the planter class. A Union pilot and captain for the duration of the war, he helped found the Republican Party in South Carolina in 1867 and served as a state senator and United States congressman. In the process, he became a key player in Reconstruction, the short-lived experiment in bi-racial democracy that former planters across the South viewed as an abomination second only to emancipation. And in a twist that must have made even the most die-hard paternalist take notice, Smalls bought the home of his former master, moving his real family into the very place where his so-called white family had once resided.
*
Sources: Charleston Daily Courier, May 14, 1862; Edward A. Miller, Jr., “Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915”; Philip Dray, “Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen”; Andrew Billingsley, “Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families”; Okon E. Uya, “From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839-1915”; Lacy Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South”; Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South”; Norrece T. Jones Jr., “Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina”; Douglas R. Egerton, “He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey”; “Religious Instruction of Slaves: Twelfth Annual Report of the Liberty County Association for the Instruction of Slaves, 1847,” Southern Quarterly Review 14 (July 1848); Liberator, Sept. 12, 1862.
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle are assistant professors of history at California State University, Fresno and the authors of the forthcoming “Searching for Slavery in the Cradle of the Confederacy.”
*
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/robert-smallss-great-escape/ [with comments]
Robert Smalls and the Planter, from Harper’s Weekly
Library of Congress
By BLAIN ROBERTS and ETHAN J. KYTLE
May 12, 2012, 5:45 pm
As elite Charlestonians slept unaware in the lavish mansions of the Confederacy’s spiritual capital, a slave — a mulatto man trusted by both his owners and employers — executed a daring plot that struck at the core of the white Southern imagination.
In the early morning of Tuesday, May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls, the wheelman of the Planter, commandeered the former cotton steamer turned Confederate supply boat. His plan: to sail through the harbor, beyond Confederate fortifications, to the Union blockade — to freedom. On board were the rest of the enslaved crew and nearly a dozen other bondspeople, including Smalls’s wife and two children.
He and his co-conspirators had certainly planned their mission well. As Smalls had predicted, the Planter’s white officers, tired from a week’s absence from the city, ignored Confederate naval policy requiring that one officer stay with the ship and went ashore for the evening. Smalls also took to heart a remark made by one of his fellow crewman — “Boy, you look jes like de captain” — and donned the white skipper’s naval jacket and trademark straw hat. Aided by the disguise and the dusky light of the early morning, Smalls gambled that he could pass for the officer once the Planter reached Fort Sumter, which would have to grant the boat permission to leave the harbor.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, was Smalls’s knowledge of his trade and the waters of Charleston Harbor. A skilled sailor since childhood, Smalls had spent the past few years working on boats that served the city’s bustling port, passing on a portion of his pay to his permissive master. In the summer of 1861, he had accepted a job aboard the Planter, which had been commissioned by the Confederacy to help defend Charleston. He thus knew the signals the boat would have to use to pass Fort Sumter, and he knew where the mines were, since he himself had laid them.
Still, it was an audacious undertaking. Should they be caught, Smalls acknowledged to his wife, the outcome was assured. “I shall be shot,” he stated matter-of-factly.
But the plan worked. The sentinel at Fort Sumter answered the ship’s signal with the cry, “Pass the Planter,” and Smalls and his crew barreled ahead toward the Union blockade. The ship announced its friendly intentions by removing the Confederate flag for a white bed sheet. Realizing they had made it, the slaves on board, according to the captain of the Union ship Onward, flocked to the deck, “some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking toward Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it.” Upon meeting the captain, Smalls revealed that freedom had not been his only goal. “I thought the Planter,” he wryly offered, “might be of some use to Uncle Abe.”
Smalls’s feat caught Northerners and Southerners off guard. In the North, Smalls was hailed as a hero, and his courageous scheme spoke to one of the most pressing policy debates of the war, persuading some reluctant Northerners that blacks would indeed don a blue uniform and fight for their liberty. A Pennsylvania Congressman argued that the incident proved that blacks had “enterprise, energy, and capacity, and may be trusted to go it alone.” It was no surprise, then, that Union General David Hunter, who advocated arming former slaves, sent Smalls as part of a delegation to convince President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton of the wisdom of this course later that summer.
But in the Confederacy, the story was a bitter pill to swallow. “Our community was intensely agitated Tuesday morning,” reported the Charleston Daily Courier on May 14. Smalls had deprived the upstart nation of precious commodities — 17 former bondspeople and a gunboat that Smalls claimed was worth $30,000 — while providing the Union Navy with essential intelligence about the waterways surrounding Charleston. More generally, the Planter incident offered an unsettling answer to a question that Southern slaveholders had been wrestling with for much of the 19th century: Were slaves faithful servants or enemies in their midst?
Many Old South planters labored under the delusion that slavery was a domestic institution governed by familial rather than market values. Positing themselves as benevolent patriarchs, they claimed to provide for the material and spiritual needs of their “black family” just as they did for their “white family.” “God in his good Providence has brought these heathen to our very doors,” insisted a writer in the Southern Quarterly Review in 1848. “In our dwellings … devolve upon us obligations and duties as solemn and responsible as those we owe to our children.”
A curious admixture of Christian stewardship, white supremacy and self-interest, this paternalist ethos promised to pay moral and practical dividends for Southern society. Since humanely treated slaves were healthier, lived longer and thus produced far more rice, cotton, sugar and tobacco, planters could attend to the Christian responsibility to guide their uncivilized charges as they lined their pockets.
And as the abolitionist chorus grew louder in the 1830s, paternalism also made for good sectional propaganda. Southern politicians and theorists like James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh contrasted the cold calculus of the free-market North with the tender bonds that knit together the plantation South. Although few paternalists practiced what they preached — slave families, for instance, were regularly broken up at the auction block — many nonetheless held fast to the notion that their slaves were loyal members of their plantation family.
Yet to a second group of slaveholders, this was utter nonsense. Paternalism, they argued, was a poor substitute for a firm hand when it came to managing the enslaved. When slaves disobeyed, ran away or threatened rebellion, these anti-paternalists pointed the finger at indulgent masters, who gave their slaves too many liberties and privileges, and evangelical missionaries, who sought to nurture Christian faith by teaching the enslaved to read and write.
In Charleston, for example, free black and enslaved members of the city’s African Methodist Episcopal congregation had plotted a slave uprising in 1822. James Hamilton Jr., the city attendant and future governor of South Carolina, blamed the “misguided benevolence” of local slaveholders for the thwarted uprising, led by Denmark Vesey. He noted that its “ringleaders” were among “the most humanely treated negroes in the city.” In response to the Vesey scare, the state cracked down on the few liberties afforded free blacks and slaves. In the meantime, Charleston shored up its defenses against insurrection, beginning work on the Citadel, a formidable arsenal in the center of the city, which would eventually become the home of the South Carolina Military Academy.
Nevertheless, paternalism remained a powerful influence in Charleston and across the South through the Civil War. Southerners ruled their slaveholding society through force and coercion on the one hand, and indulgence and negotiation on the other. A paternalist faith in slave loyalty was nowhere more evident than in the white crew’s decision to leave Smalls and his enslaved colleagues on the Planter while they went ashore for the evening.
Smalls’s escape, like countless less famous episodes over the course of the war, undoubtedly dispelled many masters’ illusions about the devotion of their human chattel. Yet even after thousands of slaves ran away behind Union lines, and thousands more followed Smalls into armed service against the Confederacy, some slaveholders remained blinded by the paternalist ethos. In May 1865, just months after black Charlestonians had paraded through the streets of the city celebrating their liberation, a local planter named Henry William Ravenel wrote of his slaves, “As they always been faithful and attached to us, and have been raised as family servants, and have all of them been in our family for several generations, there is a feeling towards them somewhat like that of a father.”
Robert Smalls, for his part, remained an enemy in the midst of the planter class. A Union pilot and captain for the duration of the war, he helped found the Republican Party in South Carolina in 1867 and served as a state senator and United States congressman. In the process, he became a key player in Reconstruction, the short-lived experiment in bi-racial democracy that former planters across the South viewed as an abomination second only to emancipation. And in a twist that must have made even the most die-hard paternalist take notice, Smalls bought the home of his former master, moving his real family into the very place where his so-called white family had once resided.
*
Sources: Charleston Daily Courier, May 14, 1862; Edward A. Miller, Jr., “Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839-1915”; Philip Dray, “Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen”; Andrew Billingsley, “Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families”; Okon E. Uya, “From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839-1915”; Lacy Ford, “Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South”; Kenneth M. Stampp, “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South”; Norrece T. Jones Jr., “Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina”; Douglas R. Egerton, “He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey”; “Religious Instruction of Slaves: Twelfth Annual Report of the Liberty County Association for the Instruction of Slaves, 1847,” Southern Quarterly Review 14 (July 1848); Liberator, Sept. 12, 1862.
Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle are assistant professors of history at California State University, Fresno and the authors of the forthcoming “Searching for Slavery in the Cradle of the Confederacy.”
*
Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/disunion/
*
© 2012 The New York Times Company
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/robert-smallss-great-escape/ [with comments]
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
