In the Service of the Confederacy
In the late 1850s, as Charleston bustled with business from the cotton and rice trade, and African American men, women, and children were routinely put up for auction, Robert Smalls and Hannah continued to work long hours to secure more money. They hoped to save enough to one day meet Kingman’s demand. Each month they were reminded of what could happen to them as the couple saw other enslaved people sold and their respective families torn apart.
Smalls knew that if he came back from the wharf one day and learned that Hannah or Elizabeth had been taken from him, he would find their loss unbearable. His own mother had been taken from her family when she was about nine years old, and Smalls had been sent to Charleston on his own at twelve. Those separations had been heart-wrenching, but losing his daughter would be even more agonizing. And while Kingman had set a price and agreed to sell Hannah and Elizabeth to Smalls, he had no power to enforce the agreement if Kingman changed his mind.
Waiting was simply too risky; it could be years before he and Hannah had saved enough. The only option was escape. Much was happening in the country, and significant changes seemed inevitable. Perhaps one of these changes would give Smalls the key to freedom for himself and his family. He would be watching and waiting, ready to take action when the time came.
* * *
By the elections of 1860 the turmoil over slavery that had been brewing for decades was finally erupting. Much of the tumult was occurring in Charleston, where Smalls and many others hoping for freedom closely followed what was happening. What he did not witness on his own, he learned by listening carefully to the chatter on the streets and docks and by talking to other slaves. Like all enslaved people, his illiteracy was enforced, but he knew reading was not the only way to stay informed. In fact, Smalls was a member of several mutual aid societies that African Americans in Charleston had created. These societies typically helped their members take care of the sick, pay for funerals, and provided support to widows and children. Their members also shared important news.
Through his connections Smalls must have known that in April 1860 the national Democratic Convention had met in Charleston to nominate a presidential candidate. Tensions in the party about allowing slavery in the western territories, however, quickly divided it into Northern and Southern factions. When many of the Southern delegates walked out of the convention, the remaining delegates were unable to secure the two-thirds majority needed to select a party nominee.
Northern Democrats reconvened in Baltimore and eventually chose Stephen Douglas, a senator from Illinois, as their nominee. Douglas believed in popular sovereignty, which argued that the people of the western territories should decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. Radical pro-slavery Southerners, known as fire-eaters, met in Richmond, Virginia, and nominated the sitting vice president, John Breckinridge. He wanted to follow the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which opened the territories to slavery.
The Republicans, who opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories, nominated Abraham Lincoln for president at their convention in Chicago in May. That same month the newly formed Constitutional Union Party, which argued for compromise in order to preserve the Union, nominated John Bell of Tennessee when it met in Baltimore. Bell, a slaveholder, was against expanding slavery into the western territories.
Americans were now so divided over slavery that they had four presidential candidates. With so many candidates splitting the vote, Lincoln was declared the winner in November 1860 with just 180 electoral votes and 39.8 percent of the popular vote. Not surprisingly, not a single electoral vote for Lincoln came from the South.1
South Carolinians were furious at the results, believing that Lincoln was hostile to slavery and a threat to their way of life. Almost immediately an outbreak of secession fever hit the state, and six weeks after the election Charleston hosted the state’s secession convention.
On December 20, 1860, at 1:15 in the afternoon, the convention delegates voted unanimously to leave the Union, making South Carolina the first state to secede. White Charlestonians erupted in celebration at the news. “The firing of guns and the ringing of bells announced the fact to the eager populace, and ever since that time, we have been living in a scene of the wildest excitement, a double-distilled Fourth of July,” wrote a Charleston correspondent for the Boston Post. Within minutes of the declaration the Charleston Mercury, owned by Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., the son of the notorious fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, Sr., had printed its famous “The Union Is Dissolved” broadsheet and blanketed the city with copies.
When Union major Robert Anderson, the fifty-five-year-old commander at nearby Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island, learned the news, he became concerned that his men and the families stationed with them were vulnerable to attack by the South Carolina militia. In an effort to protect them, Anderson moved them in the middle of the night of December 26 to Fort Sumter, a location far easier to defend. The move, however, was controversial and provocative. South Carolinians believed the federal government had no right to occupy the fort since South Carolina was no longer part of the Union. The result was a bitter standoff between the state’s militia and the federal troops at Fort Sumter.2
By January 1861 Anderson, his men, and their families were running out of food. To reinforce and resupply Anderson, President James Buchanan sent two hundred soldiers and numerous provisions on an unarmed merchant ship, the Star of the West. But the ship was never able to deliver either. As the vessel approached the fort, Charles J. Relyea, then captain of the General Clinch (and later captain of the Planter), signaled the arrival of the Star. Confederate cadets from the Citadel, South Carolina’s military college in Charleston, were manning an artillery battery on Morris Island and saw Relyea’s signal. They opened fire.3 Now under attack, the Star of the West tried to move out of range of the guns, but it was soon also dodging fire from Fort Moultrie as Confederate patrol vessels closed in on the merchant ship. Anderson had not been expecting the Star of the West and was unable to offer assistance in time.
While the Confederates allowed the families of the soldiers to leave in early February, the standoff between the North and the South continued for months as South Carolina’s leaders wrangled with Washington. As the negotiations failed, other Southern states eager to preserve the institution of slavery joined South Carolina in breaking from the Union.
By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, the Union troops at Fort Sumter were in dire need of food and supplies, and the Confederacy’s anger at the continued occupation of the fort was growing. As the situation escalated during the next month, Lincoln announced that he would send provisions to Fort Sumter, which infuriated the Confederacy. In response the Confederates ordered the federal troops to surrender, but Anderson steadfastly refused. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces fired the first shots of the Civil War on Fort Sumter.4
The war had arrived. Many of Charleston’s white residents watched excitedly from the rooftops of their grand homes as Fort Sumter fell to the Confederate bombardment.5 A headline in the Charleston Mercury called it a “Splendid Pyrotechnic Exhibition,” and the paper declared that “the Administration of the old Government may abandon at once and forever its vain and visionary hope of forcible control over the Confederate States.”6
* * *
Smalls almost certainly watched the attack and the many celebrations that erupted in Charleston’s streets during the next few days. Seeing the Confederates rejoice at their victory may have even strengthened his determination to flee.
Another development also added to Smalls’ already ample motivation to escape. He and Hannah now had a son they named Robert Smalls, Jr. The boy, who was sometimes called Beauregard, had been born around February 1861, just two months before the outbreak of the war.7
Smalls and Hannah had not yet earned enough to buy the freedom of Hannah and Elizabeth, although they were still trying to do so. And with the birth of Robert, Jr., Kingman was likely to up the price. Until Smalls could find a way to get his family out of Charleston, he would continue to earn as much money as possible in the hope of keeping his family together.
When Smalls was twenty-two, a new opportunity for work presented itself. In June 1861 he joined the crew of the Planter as a deckhand. In this new position Smalls earned $16 a month from John Ferguson, the owner of the steamer. Most of it went directly to Henry McKee, but Smalls had negotiated with McKee to keep one dollar for himself. Even so small an amount helped Smalls get closer to Kingman’s asking price.
* * *
As the summer heat intensified, so did the war. In July 1861 a Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia, made many in Washington, D.C., finally understand that the fighting would not end as quickly as they had predicted.8 Now the government grew increasingly concerned that slave labor was providing the South with a distinct advantage. To remedy this Congress authorized the first Confiscation Act in August, which allowed the Union to seize any enslaved people used to aid the rebellion. It was a small but significant step toward universal emancipation.9
Passage of the act meant slaves seized by the Union were no longer obligated in any way to their former masters, but they also were not emancipated. They were considered “contrabands.” Whether they should be granted their freedom was still a matter of intense debate nationally. Some whites questioned whether the country had the right to free anyone from slavery, given that the Dred Scott decision said that people of African ancestry, whether free or enslaved, could never become citizens of the United States. Others argued that freeing the enslaved could end any chance of bringing the seceded states back into the Union.
The term contraband was freshly coined. It had originated a few months earlier after the Union major general Benjamin Butler, a lawyer by trade, refused to return three young enslaved men seeking refuge after they had rowed to Fort Monroe at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay one night in May 1861. The men were field hands forced by the Confederacy to build an artillery emplacement in the dunes across the water from the fort, and they were about to be sent to North Carolina to build more fortifications. Butler ignored the Fugitive Slave Act and refused to send the men to the Confederate colonel demanding their return.10
Butler was not an abolitionist, but he thought it foolish to return these men to the Confederacy, where they would be severely punished and perhaps forced to work against the Union again. Instead, Butler argued, the Fugitive Slave Act no longer applied to Virginia since it had recently seceded and was no longer under the protection of the Constitution. Butler also argued that he had the right to seize any enemy property that was being used against the country. Within days dozens of contrabands had arrived at Fort Monroe, including women and children. By June five hundred more people had arrived.
Lincoln and his cabinet wrestled with how to respond. At the time Lincoln’s main focus was to preserve the Union, which he could do only by placating the slave states that had not seceded. These states, also known as border states, included Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri. (West Virginia, which would not be admitted to the Union until June 1863, would also become a border state.) Although Lincoln thought slavery was unjust, at the time he believed the way to end slavery was to send blacks out of the country, to Africa or Central America. Lincoln also believed that his role as president required him to uphold the law of the land, which meant not interfering with slavery. In his inaugural address a few months earlier, he had said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”11
Others, including men like the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who had once been enslaved, disagreed and argued that emancipation should be a major aim of the war and would help the Union succeed. “The very stomach of this rebellion is the negro in the form of a slave,” Douglass wrote in 1861. “Arrest that hoe in the hands of the negro, and you smite the rebellion in the very seat of its life.”12 Lincoln would eventually agree.
On May 30 Secretary of War Simon Cameron wrote to Major General Butler to say the Lincoln administration had approved his decision not to return the three men. Cameron’s letter, however, left many questions unanswered. In his closing remarks he wrote, “The question of their final disposition will be reserved for further determination.”13 Were these men, women, and children free, or had they just gone from one master to another?
Their future would remain unclear for some time. But few, if any, of the formerly enslaved were aware of the distinction. Once they made it to Union lines, they simply celebrated their freedom.14
* * *
By the fall of 1861, as the country braced for a long and bloody war, Smalls was a tested member of the Planter’s crew. The vessel’s white officers had noted Smalls’ skills on the water and had promoted him to wheelman. Ferguson was now leasing the steamer to the Confederacy, and the crew was kept busy transporting soldiers and military supplies. They were also getting used to their new captain, Relyea, who often wore a wide-brimmed straw hat when he was on the water.
While Smalls adapted to his new duties and his new commanding officer, he continued to look for opportunities to escape. It was an especially anxious time in Charleston, as most residents, white and black alike, knew that the city was considered the spiritual capital of the Confederacy and therefore was a prime target for the Union. They were right to be anxious.
To enforce the blockade that Lincoln had put in place against the Confederacy, the Navy desperately needed Southern resupply ports for its coal-fired steamships. On October 29, after months of planning, the largest armada ever assembled by the U.S. Navy set sail from Fort Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The fleet, formally the South Atlantic Blocking Squadron, was heading south to attempt to capture a deepwater harbor to serve as a fuel and provisioning depot for the ships blockading the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
As newspapers reported the departure of the fleet—17 warships, 25 colliers, 33 transports, 157 big guns, and more than 12,000 men—the Confederates could only guess its destination. They knew that South Carolina’s Port Royal, one of the largest ports in the South, was a potential target.15
In charge of the armada was fifty-eight-year-old Cmdre. Samuel Francis Du Pont, a man who would become an important figure in Robert Smalls’ life. He was one of the most respected officers in the Navy and a member of the famed Delaware family. At six feet four inches he was unusually tall, but his perfect posture made him seem even taller. His salt-and-pepper muttonchops, high forehead, and straight nose added to his distinguished appearance.
Accompanying Du Pont on the mission was Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman, forty-eight, of Newport, Rhode Island. While Du Pont was in charge of naval forces, Sherman was in charge of land forces. Throughout the war Sherman’s name would be confused with that of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of Ohio, who would lead the famous and destructive March to the Sea in late 1864. Thomas Sherman, however, was a well-respected and accomplished soldier in his own right and had received a brevet of gallantry for his actions during the Mexican War.16
The destination of Du Pont and Sherman, the South would soon learn, was Port Royal Sound near Beaufort. This strategic sound, a deep natural harbor on South Carolina’s coast between Charleston and Savannah, Georgia, would provide the Union with the critical supply depot it needed and a base for military operations.
To capture Port Royal, however, the Union would have to face the two Confederate forts that straddled the wide inlet that formed the entrance to the sound. Both forts had recently been constructed by slave labor to protect the harbor in case of a Union attack. Fort Walker on Hilton Head Island formed the southern shore of the inlet, while Fort Beauregard was located at Bay Point on St. Phillips Island and commanded the northern shore. The two forts were more than two miles apart, and between them mounted thirty-nine guns.
Just getting the South Atlantic Blocking Squadron to Port Royal proved more difficult than either Du Pont or Sherman had anticipated. On its way the armada encountered a violent storm that scattered the vessels and destroyed three cargo ships and one transport.17 The losses included several crew members, but it could have been much worse. “As the vessels rejoined reports came in of disasters, I expected to hear of many, but when the severity of the gale and the character of the vessels are considered, we have only cause for great thankfulness,” Du Pont wrote.18
Du Pont’s flagship, the steam frigate the Wabash, and twenty-five other ships finally anchored off Port Royal on November 4, 1861. The approach of the massive armada panicked the Confederates. As soldiers at Fort Walker and Fort Beauregard scrambled to prepare for an onslaught, Gen. Roswell Ripley, who was headquartered in Charleston, warned the citizens of Beaufort and the surrounding area to evacuate. With the forced assistance of their slaves, families rushed to pack belongings and bury the family silver and other valuables they could not carry with them. For many of the enslaved it would be the last duty they would perform for their masters.19
* * *
The Union attack was supposed to be a joint ground-naval assault, but the storm had derailed those plans. Crucial ammunition had been lost along with many of the surfboats the Union had planned to use to land troops. Du Pont forged ahead anyway and opened a solely naval offensive with the idea that once the Union had captured both forts, Sherman’s men could land and take control of the area.
A naval attack lacking support from ground forces was generally considered a poor military strategy at the time. One cannon on land was thought to equal four to five on board a ship under sail, as it was difficult for warships to maintain the fixed positions needed to accurately determine the range and direction of their targets. To do this, the ships had to anchor within range of enemy shore batteries, which made them easy marks. The brilliant Du Pont, however, realized that the greater maneuverability of steam-powered vessels rendered this conventional wisdom outdated. Instead of anchoring his ships, he could keep them moving during the assault. Also, Du Pont’s ships had larger guns than those in the Confederate forts and more of them.
On the morning of November 7, 1861, Du Pont’s flagship, Wabash, along with fifteen warships, began moving toward the entrance to Port Royal Sound in two parallel columns in a line of battle.20 As they entered the inlet with Fort Beauregard on their starboard flank and Fort Walker to port, Du Pont’s ships engaged both forts in a furious exchange of cannon fire that lasted well into the afternoon. The Union ships concentrated their initial fire on Fort Beauregard as they passed within cannon range. Then, turning in a half circle to port, they crossed the inlet and bombarded Fort Walker. Once they had completed their pass of Fort Walker, the line of ships turned in another half circle to port and passed by Fort Beauregard again. The Union repeated this maneuver around an elliptical path within the inlet until the Confederate guns went silent at about 2:30 that afternoon.21
Four hours after the fighting began, the Confederates, who numbered about four thousand, including reinforcements, abandoned both forts. The battle had been swift, with relatively few casualties: the Confederates lost 11 men and suffered 48 wounded, while the Union lost 8 men and claimed just 23 wounded.22
After months of preparation, a disastrous storm, and a quickly won battle that changed naval warfare, Du Pont had captured the harbor the Union desperately needed. Port Royal Sound was now under Union control, marking the first major Union naval victory of the war.23
* * *
Many of Beaufort’s white residents started fleeing town on the day of the attack, piling onto a paddle wheeler that took them and whatever they could carry to Charleston.24 Other white residents left by horse and carriage, jamming the main road out of town. They fled in such a hurry that they left dinners on tables, pantries full of food, and hoopskirts and hats in their wardrobes. It was a quick but emotional departure for many, who had no idea if they would ever return. “The ladies of Beaufort almost broke their hearts with grief at leaving their splendid homes,” The New York Times reported.25
Within a day or two of the battle, almost all the white residents of Beaufort District had abandoned the area, including most of Henry McKee’s family, who would eventually go to Columbia, South Carolina. The slaves would tell Union troops that the whites had run away more out of fear of a slave revolt than concern about the Union troops.26
A few house servants fled with the whites, but the majority of the enslaved people refused to leave, preferring to take their chances with the new arrivals. One who remained behind was Smalls’ mother, Lydia. Most, if not all, of Henry McKee’s more than one hundred other slaves remained behind as well.
Some African American men and women had simply ignored threats from their owners that the Union would sell them to Cuban sugar plantations, where the work was much more grueling and the life expectancy of slaves far shorter. Others had hidden in the swamps, fields, and woods.
Most white residents had been in such a hurry to flee that they did not try to force their slaves to follow them. At least one planter, Capt. John Fripp of St. Helena Island, had showed some concern for the people he was leaving behind. A Union sympathizer and one of the wealthiest men in the area, Fripp told them to stay and work the provision crops rather than the cotton. If they followed him inland, he warned, they might starve.27
The white men who belonged to the local militia had been busy doing what they could to protect the town’s assets from falling into Union hands. Henry McKee, a lieutenant in the 12th South Carolina Militia Regiment, had helped hide six barrels of gunpowder from the Beaufort arsenal at a nearby plantation during the Union’s attack on the sound before he and his men left town.28
Despite the initial panic, Union soldiers did not arrive in Beaufort until two days after they had captured the sound. Their first focus was occupying Hilton Head. In the meantime former plantation slaves, now free from their captors for the first time in their lives, ransacked and occupied Beaufort’s extravagant homes. They took food, clothing, and anything else left behind as they reveled in their freedom and gathered what they could to help themselves and their families.29
While chaos broke out in town, some white residents returned to their Beaufort plantations to burn their valuable Sea Island cotton so the Union could not profit from it. Henry McKee’s large cotton crop, which would have been worth a small fortune, was among those burned.30 The year before, Sea Island cotton had sold for 47 cents per pound, the highest price since the 1818 peak of 63 cents per pound. The estimated value of the entire 1860 Sea Island cotton crop was more than $7 million.31
A handful of white townsmen also sneaked back into Beaufort to destroy armaments at the arsenal, secure additional valuables they had left behind, and check on their homes. When Thomas Elliott returned to his house in Beaufort, he found his former slaves celebrating. One woman was playing the piano “like the very devil,” while two other women were “upstairs dancing away famously.” All the houses, Elliott wrote, had been “completely turned upside down and inside out. The organs in both churches were broken up and the churches themselves robbed of many articles which were deposited there for safe keeping.”32
The newly freed men and women were not the only ones taking advantage of the turmoil in the area. Some Union soldiers strayed from their new encampments and plundered abandoned plantations on Hilton Head and other nearby islands. When they were finished taking anything of value, they destroyed whatever was left.
Brig. Gen. Sherman was furious when he learned of his soldiers’ actions. He issued orders forbidding soldiers to enter private homes and emphasized that “the right of citizens to be secure in their property must continue.”33 Du Pont also was outraged at the pillaging and ordered his men to stop any unsanctioned boats on their way to the various islands.34
* * *
Du Pont and Sherman had not expected the white residents of Beaufort District to flee and leave behind ten thousand slaves. Hoping to entice the whites to return, Sherman posted a proclamation in the New York newspapers that he addressed to the people of South Carolina. The proclamation urged them to come back to protect their property, which included the black men, women, and children they had abandoned, and was meant to assure the former residents that the Union had no intention of harming them or their property in its attempt to stop the rebellion. Despite his efforts, the South Carolinians ignored the notices.35
Sherman then sent two men to carry the proclamation to Beaufort on November 14. No one was left in Beaufort District to whom they could deliver it, but Sherman had a plan to get the proclamation to former residents. He had also given the two men a private letter addressed to Reverend Wilson, a Beaufort resident who was also a British citizen. Before he had fled, Wilson, who seemed to be playing both sides, had secretly left a note asking the Union for protection because of his nationality. Sherman hoped that his men could find someone who could deliver his letter to Wilson and that Wilson would agree to act as a messenger and bring the proclamation to the former residents. If Sherman’s long shot worked and the residents returned, the Union would not have to take on the responsibility of caring for the abandoned slaves.
Sherman’s messengers, Lt. Augustus Wagner, from Sherman’s staff, and Francis Bacon, surgeon of the 7th Connecticut Volunteers, went by gunboat to Beaufort. From there a newly freed man guided the men into the interior of Port Royal Island by mule. Wagner and Bacon were taking a significant risk by heading into enemy territory without any military support, as no one knew how many Confederate troops remained in the area.
Carrying a flag of truce, the party moved toward the Port Royal ferry in the hope of finding someone they could trust to deliver the letter and proclamation. As they passed abandoned homes, they saw blacks working in the fields but no whites. After about eight miles they saw a lone white man on horseback, Rev. Joseph Walker, the rector of Beaufort’s St. Helena Episcopal Church. Wagner and Bacon called for Walker to stop, but initially he ignored them. Wagner and Bacon persisted, however, and eventually Walker spoke with them.
As they talked, two Confederate soldiers approached on foot; they, too, were carrying a flag of truce. One was Henry McKee, Smalls’ owner; the other was Capt. Thomas O. Barnwell. It was an unexpected turn of events, but the Union officers peacefully received the Confederate soldiers.
The group, including Walker, spoke for half an hour. McKee and Barnwell explained that they knew that their former slaves, not Union soldiers, had looted Beaufort, but they attributed the former slaves’ actions to an attempt to keep anything of value from the Union. The Union men had a far different interpretation: they surmised that the destruction was retaliation. The Confederates also said that they had sent slaves to Beaufort to burn it but that the men had decided to stay and occupy the homes in Beaufort rather than destroy them. McKee and Barnwell apparently wanted the Union men to know that they had tried to keep the town out of their hands.
Although the Confederates were willing to talk to the Union officers, they were not willing to deliver the proclamation on behalf of the Union. McKee and Barnwell said that because the proclamation was meant for “loyal citizens” of the United States, and there were none in South Carolina, there was no one to whom they could deliver it.
Their refusal was hardly a shock to the Union officers, who knew their only chance was to engage Reverend Walker in their plan. They continued to plead for his assistance, and Walker finally agreed to deliver the letter and proclamation to Wilson. The Confederate soldiers did not interfere.36
Regardless of Sherman’s efforts, the citizens who had fled did not return. The Union’s arrival had shattered the lives they had been leading. Beaufort, the first town in the Deep South captured by the Union, and the surrounding area had suddenly changed forever. In a matter of days the way of life that had existed for generations was gone. The planters had fled their homes; they had been forced to burn their cotton and any remaining would soon be taken by the Union; their slaves were now in Union hands and essentially free; and their property would be confiscated. They had lost everything. Some would never come back, preferring to remember the town as it had once been. Others would spend years after the war trying to reclaim their homes and property. Despite their best attempts, they would never again hold the power and prestige they had claimed before the war.
* * *
The Union quickly established its headquarters on Hilton Head Island, which, before its arrival, had consisted of more than twenty plantations, Fort Walker, and little else. In deference to the strategic value of the sound, however, the military and the press would refer to the headquarters and surrounding area as Port Royal.
Within weeks Port Royal was humming with activity as fourteen thousand Union soldiers occupied the area. New buildings, wharves, and horse-drawn wagons quickly changed the barren landscape, while numerous ships crowded the nearby waters. A new era had begun.37
* * *
Smalls soon learned of the dramatic events in Beaufort, as did the rest of Charleston. The change he had been waiting to see for most of his life appeared to finally be taking place. Those who had kept him, his mother, and so many others enslaved had lost their reign over the Port Royal area. And now thousands of Union forces were just miles from Charleston. Smalls had to believe it was only a matter of time before they reached the city.
With this news, Smalls also celebrated that his mother, Lydia, was essentially free. The Union labeled her and the other former slaves in Beaufort as contrabands, but she was now within Union lines. Although he still must have had concerns about her well-being, he knew she was far safer in Union territory than in that of the Confederacy.
While Smalls and the rest of Charleston anticipated a Union attack, another event caused as much damage as the Union might have that winter. On a windy and chilly evening in December 1861, a month after the Battle of Port Royal, a devastating fire blazed through the streets, leaving a path of destruction roughly a mile long and one-seventh of a mile wide. It caused an estimated $8 million in damage and burned 145 acres. Residents and fire fighters had tried to stop it from engulfing block after block, but the flames had continued to spread. When the fire finally died, nearly six hundred homes, as well as churches and public buildings, had burned to the ground. Much of Charleston suddenly looked as if it had already been shattered by war.38
Adding to the devastation caused by the fire were dangerously dwindling supplies of medicine, food, manufactured goods, and other necessities. Blockade runners brought these provisions into Charleston, but the prices for these everyday items had skyrocketed and quantities were limited. The city’s residents were so desperate for basic necessities that the Charleston Mercury was running stories about how to make soap. Luxuries were even more scarce, and the paper excitedly announced when a few dozen bottles of cologne arrived.39 The city, whose former prosperity and strident secessionist beliefs had once made some Charlestonians feel invincible, was now weak and suffering, pervaded by a wholly unfamiliar sense of vulnerability and panic. For enslaved men and women like Smalls and Hannah, these difficult times for the city made their harsh lives even more so.
Despite the difficulties, Charleston and its population would get no sympathy from the North. The city was now so reviled that in February 1862 the Union major general George B. McClellan wrote to Gen. William T. Sherman that “the greatest moral effect would be produced by the reduction of Charleston and its defenses. There the rebellion had its birth; there the unnatural hatred of our Government is most intense; there is the center of the boasted power and courage of the rebels.”40
Charlestonians were keenly aware of the hatred for them in the North and the extreme pride the Union would have in capturing their city. After all, Charleston had hosted the Democratic convention in April 1860 and South Carolina’s secession convention that December, and the following April the first shots of the war had been fired in the city’s harbor. Most Charlestonians had no doubt that the Union was itching for the city to feel its full wrath.
* * *
Much to the surprise of Charleston’s residents, the Union attack did not come that winter or even that spring. The city remained on alert when the Union captured New Orleans in late April. By May 1862 the Confederates were so certain that an assault was imminent they prepared to instate martial law in Charleston. Confederate president Jefferson Davis had already declared Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, under martial law in late February in anticipation of Union attacks. Days later he had done the same in Richmond.41
Fears among the white citizens of Charleston only escalated when the Union major general David Hunter, a fervent abolitionist, unexpectedly declared all enslaved people in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina free on May 9. The proclamation was a surprise even to other Union military leaders in Port Royal, including Du Pont, who remained in charge of the naval forces.42
Less than two months earlier, at the end of March, Hunter had replaced Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman, who had been in charge of the land forces at Port Royal. Hunter was now the commander of the Union’s newly formed Department of the South, which included the three states in which Hunter had declared the slaves free.
The fifty-nine-year-old Hunter, who dyed his long mustache dark brown to match the wig he wore in an effort to look younger, was originally from Princeton, New Jersey, and had been in the Army for most of his adult life. He was nicknamed “Black Dave” for his dark complexion and gray eyes, and while stationed in Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1860 he had started a correspondence with Abraham Lincoln, then the Republican presidential nominee. Lincoln was so impressed with Hunter and the strong antislavery views he advocated in his letters that the president-elect invited him to ride the inaugural train from Springfield, Illinois, to Washington, D.C., in February 1861. Hunter’s friendship with the new president also helped him secure a high-ranking appointment in Washington that led to his fast promotion to major general.43
Only weeks after he arrived at Port Royal, Hunter, generally a quiet man but possessed of almost unparalleled determination, had placed the states in his new department under martial law. He argued that it was a military necessity because those states had taken up arms against the United States. He then reasoned that “slavery and martial law in a free country are altogether incompatible,” so the enslaved people in the three states were “forever free.”
The controversial proclamation made headlines throughout the country and infuriated Lincoln. Hunter had acted without Lincoln’s approval, and Lincoln rescinded the proclamation as soon as he learned of it.
Hunter was not the first Union general to issue such a proclamation. Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, responsible for the Department of the West, had issued a similar announcement a year earlier, asserting that the war was a war against slavery. Frémont, however, had limited his proclamation to those slaves whose owners were in rebellion. Hunter had declared freedom for all the slaves, regardless of their owners’ loyalties. Both men had stepped well beyond their authority in issuing such declarations, and Lincoln quickly revoked Frémont’s proclamation, just as he had Hunter’s.
Hunter’s motivation was based largely on his beliefs as an abolitionist, but he also wanted to give newly freed African American men a strong reason to fight for the Union. Before Hunter arrived in Port Royal, he had met with Secretary of War Stanton, who privately supported enlisting blacks in the Army. At this meeting Hunter is thought to have received approval from Stanton to enlist black soldiers, even though Army policy still forbade it.44
African Americans had served in the Revolutionary War and in the War of 1812, but the Militia Act of 1792 prevented blacks from bearing arms on behalf of the U.S. Army. When many African American men tried to enlist at the outbreak of the Civil War, they were turned away. The Lincoln administration was opposed to enlisting African Americans primarily because it feared that doing so would push the still-loyal border states to secede.45
Hunter was so certain that he had Stanton’s approval that he had been in Port Royal for only three days when he asked the War Department to send 50,000 muskets, 10 million rounds of ammunition, and 50,000 red pantaloons for his new recruits.
Despite Hunter’s enthusiasm, he had quickly learned upon arriving in the area that most of the newly freed blacks did not want to fight if they were not guaranteed freedom. Some also feared that the Union was trying to trap them and send them as slaves to Cuba, just as their Southern owners had claimed the Union would.
To encourage these African American men to enlist, Hunter declared his unsanctioned emancipation proclamation on May 9, 1862. But he was impatient to see if the order had the intended effect. Two days later he ordered several companies of his soldiers to bring five hundred formerly enslaved men, aged eighteen to forty-five, from the Sea Island plantations to Beaufort. On May 12, the day before Smalls escaped from Charleston, Hunter’s soldiers went from one plantation to the next to gather men. Many blacks went voluntarily, but those who would not were forced at gunpoint.
Despite Hunter’s forceful measures, once the men reached Hilton Head, they were given a choice of whether to join the Army. The majority enlisted.
As word of the emancipation of the enslaved people in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida spread, many in the North who were against slavery cheered while the South fumed. The strong reaction, both pro and con, overshadowed the government’s concerns about Hunter’s creating a black regiment and the extreme actions he had taken to do so. In the coming weeks the Lincoln administration would be so busy denouncing the proclamation and handling the fallout from it that it would not formally address the recruiting of black soldiers until that summer.46
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As Hunter was preparing to assemble a black regiment, Smalls was planning his escape. Just hours later he, his crew, and his beloved family were safely in Union hands.