Robert Smalls

Formerly enslaved pilot who seized a Confederate ship in 1862 and later represented South Carolina in the House.

Overview

Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, Smalls was working as a pilot aboard the Confederate transport Planter when, in May 1862, he took command of the vessel before dawn, picked up his family and other enslaved people, and steered it past Charleston harbor forts to the Union blockade. The feat made him a national hero and strengthened the case for enlisting Black soldiers in the Union army. After the war he served in the state legislature and then in Congress during the late 1870s and 1880s. At the 1895 state constitutional convention he fought, unsuccessfully, against measures to disenfranchise Black voters.