Confederate History Month – part the third.

In a comment to my Holocaust Day post, commenter/internet buddy absurdbeats wrote “The history matters—the actual history, the actual lives and deaths of millions of human beings. Not the mythification and weaponization of history, but the actuality of it. The actual horror of it.” Truer words have never been spoke.

In something of that spirit, and following in the rather formidable footprints of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I’ve decided to mark Confederate History Month — by learning and blogging about a handful of real Southern heroes about whom I had never heard until TNC mentioned them (I started with General George Henry Thomas and continued with Elizabeth Van Lew, if you want to catch up!). Today’s hero: Robert Smalls.

Robert Smalls

We actually just missed Robert Smalls’s birthday: He was born on April 5, 1839 in a South Carolina slave cabin. It’s known that Smalls’s father was a white man, probably either John K. McKee, Lydia Smalls’s owner, or a Jewish merchant named Moses Goldsmith. Lydia was 49 when Robert was born, and he was her only child.

Until he was 12 years old, Smalls worked as a house slave; after that, he was hired out, initially only allowed to keep $1 a month of his pay, but at age 18 (and by now a married man) he negotiated a deal by which he was able to keep $15 a month. When Smalls’s wife Hannah Jones (15 years his senior) gave birth to their first baby, a daughter they named Elizabeth Lydia, he negotiated a second deal — one by which he was able to buy his wife and their little girl for $800. Robert and Hannah’s second child, Robert, Jr., was born the same year that the Civil War broke out, in 1861.

As a hired hand, Smalls worked in a wide range of professions, including waiter, lamplighter, stevedore, ship rigger and sailor — and these last two would quickly prove of particular importance to the Union Army.

Hired as a deckhand on the Confederate transport steamer Planter, Smalls was soon made its pilot. The 147-foot vessel was docked outside the home and office of its commander, Brigadier General Roswell Ripley; on May 13, 1862, it was loaded with armaments intended for Confederate forts. Before dawn, however, Smalls and a crew of Black men commandeered the ship and sailed to a nearby dock where his wife and children and several slaves were waiting on a second ship.

Sailing past rebel forts, Smalls’s knowledge of the ship and the Confederate Navy allowed him to evade capture: He wore the captain’s hat and stood as a captain would in the pilot house, giving the appropriate whistle signals until he reached the Union blockade, where he raised a flag of surrender before the Union vessel could fire. Thus Smalls presented the Union Navy with what the northern press soon referred to as “the first trophy of Fort Sumter.”

‘One of the most heroic acts of the war,’ reported the New York Times on May 19, 1862. Later, the commander of the Union navy along the South Atlantic coast, Rear Admiral Samuel F. Du Pont, pronounced it ‘one of the coolest and most gallant naval acts of war.’ (Historynet.com)

Newspaper editorials citing Smalls’ gallantry shattered stereotypes about the capability of blacks. An editorial in the New York Daily Tribune said, “Is he not also a man – and is he not fit for freedom, since he made such a hazardous dash to gain it? . . . Is he not a man and a hero – whose pluck has not been questioned by even The Charleston Courier or The New York Herald? . . . What white man has made a bolder dash, or won a richer prize in the teeth of such perils during the war? . . . Perhaps [blacks are inferior to whites] but they seem to possess good material for improvement. Few white men have a better record than Robert Smalls.” (The Robert Smalls Foundation)

Just learning this little bit about Smalls, I was struck by the sheer arrogance involved in hiring a slave to pilot a Confederate vessel. Did the commander and crew think him uninterested in freedom, or lacking in the courage or foresight to try to gain it? Did they think the Union cause so baseless as to be unworthy of his (or their) attention? Was Smalls a “good nigger,” one they believed would never “run off”? What kind of one-dimensional understanding did they have of this man? This was, after all, a man who had negotiated an actual salary (however small) from his own master, and managed to purchase the freedom of his wife and child — and to the tune of what would be equivalent to more than $20,000 in today’s currency — all before he was even 22 years old.

I’m also struck by the age of Smalls’s wife — did growing up with an older mother teach the boy to appreciate the wisdom of age? And then there’s the fact that his mother was forty-nine years old when he was born. Even today, that’s pretty late to be having a baby! What’s the story behind his conception? Was it rape, or did Lydia have a relationship — however understood — with either or both of the white men who may have been Robert’s father? Was there joy at finally having a child of her own? Was their sorrow at bringing another person into slavery? And did she — please God — live long enough to see her only child become an American hero?

I hope she did. I hope she knew that the child born into a slave cabin ultimately won the freedom of more than a dozen other slaves, and made a crucial contribution to advancing the United States to the day — mere months later, on January 1, 1863 — on which Mr. Lincoln would declare that “all persons held as slaves… are, and henceforward shall be free.”

Posted by emilylhauser on April 27, 2010

http://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/confederate-history-month-part-the-third/