Special Edition: On the Occasion of his 185th Birthday

Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Robert Smalls

Here’s the question:

What would you risk your life for?

What about the people you love most? What would you risk other people’s lives for?

In 1862, a young man on a boat in Charleston harbor risked everything he had for everything he hoped.

Raise your hand if you know the story of Robert Smalls.

In my “new hometown” of Beaufort, SC we’re celebrating Robert Smalls’ 185th birthday today. He changed all of our lives. Yours too, most likely, even if you don’t know it.

Here’s a very short and inadequate version of this man’s extraordinary story:

Robert Smalls was born enslaved behind his owner’s house on Prince Street right here in Beaufort in 1839. When he around 12 years old, he was “leased out” in Charleston, so he worked there, and the wages were sent back to Beaufort. His first job was to clean and light the street lamps in Charleston. Then he worked in the restaurant of the Planters Inn, but soon he was working on a cotton steamer in Charleston Harbor. When the Civil War began, right there over Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, the confederacy leased those cotton steamers and made them troop boats and arms boats, and so now Robert Smalls was enslaved on a boat that was in the service of keeping him enslaved. Imagine that.

About a year later, under the dark of night, 23 year old Robert Smalls commandeered that boat, full of ammunition and dynamite,and sailed it past all six forts in CHS harbor. He knew the channels, he knew the signals – and he knew that if they were discovered, they’d be fired on and the boat would explode into splinters. Or they’d be captured and tortured and executed.

They made it. Smalls surrendered the boat to the Union blockade just outside the harbor, and they were all liberated. They were free. Not safe, but free. And Smalls was offered a job – a paying job for a free man – on that same boat that the Union Navy now possessed. For the rest of the war, he served, heroically, on that boat, for the United States.,

And when the war was over, he came back to Beaufort – which of course had been occupied early in the war. The houses that were evacuated during what is affectionately called The Great Skeddadle of 1861 – those houses could be purchased for the payment of back taxes. So Mr. Smalls – 26 years old – went to the tax office and bought the house he’d been born behind.

And he lived there, raised his family there, for the rest of his life. That’s where he died, at the age of 75 – just a few paces from where he’d been born.

Importantly, his story doesn’t stop there. It' gets bigger. He was elected to local leadership, and then to state leadership, and then to the United States Congress, serving five terms.

Smalls was responsible for helping bring commerce back to the lowcountry after the war. And he’s credited with authoring the first legislation to enact free and compulsory public education, the first of its kind in the country. It’s fair to say he’s a father of public education – but he wasn’t in our text books when I got my undergrad degree in education.

I learned about Smalls on a tour of Beaufort in 2013.

The man’s story intrigued me so thoroughly that in 2017 my late husband Tom and I moved to Beaufort to research and write a book about Robert Smalls.

And that’s when my education began.

* Why is he not in our history books?

The more I discovered, the more questions I had.

And questions ignited my curiosity and the curiosity became intrigue and intrigue became obsession.

And I researched. And learned. And wrote. And met an agent. And a publisher bought the book. (You can check it out here: Trouble the Water)

And I could talk all day long about Robert Smalls and his story, and about writing the book.

I could tell you that his commitment to literacy helped form public education.

I could tell about the compassionate and courageous ways he served his community.

I could tell you about the schools, road, and buildings that bear his name.

But today, I’m going to join friends in Beaufort to celebrate the man who brought us public education, the man whose legacy of literacy, community, courage, and commitment still creates ripples of good, the man who changed our lives.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Smalls!