Smalls, Robert

Source:

 African American National Biography

Smalls, Robert

(5 Apr. 1839–23 Feb. 1915),

congressman, was born in Beaufort, South Carolina, the son of an unknown white man and Lydia, a slave woman who worked as a house servant for the John McKee family in Beaufort. Descendants of Smalls believed that his father was John McKee, who died when Robert was young. The McKee family sent Robert to live with their relatives in Charleston, where he worked for wages that he turned over to his master. Smalls apparently taught himself the rudiments of reading and writing during this period. Later he attended school for three months, and as an adult he hired tutors. In 1856 Smalls married Hannah Jones, a slave who worked as a hotel maid. They had three children, one of whom died of smallpox. The couple lived apart from their owners, to whom they sent most of their income.

Robert Smalls, U.S. congressman from South Carolina, c. 1875. (Library of Congress.)

view larger image

In 1861 Smalls began working as a deckhand on the Planter, a steamer that operated out of Charleston Harbor. By 1862 he was the craft's pilot. He knew the locations of Confederate armaments in the channels and on shore, and he knew of the U.S. Navy fleet anchored just outside Charleston Harbor. When he learned of the federal occupation of Beaufort, Smalls determined with several other slave sailors to guide the Planter to Union waters. Secretly loading their families on board, the men rushed the vessel out of Charleston Harbor under cover of darkness and surrendered it to the U.S. Navy. Congress awarded Smalls and his aides monetary compensation for liberating the Planter from Confederate hands. From occupied Beaufort, Smalls piloted the vessel, now outfitted as a troop transport, around the Sea Islands, carrying messages, supplies, and men for the Union army. He always maintained that eventually he was commissioned as a captain, but his papers were lost, and after the war he had difficulty proving his service when he tried to obtain a pension. He piloted other ships as well, including the ironclad Keokuk in an unsuccessful assault on the city of Charleston.

During the war Smalls and his family traveled to the North to elicit popular sympathy for the slaves' plight and to attest to the service ex-slaves might perform if the federal government would allow them the opportunity. Smalls began a store for freedpeople in Beaufort and, at the war's end, bought his former owner's house, where Smalls resided until his death, for unpaid taxes. By 1870 Smalls had six thousand dollars in real estate and one thousand dollars in personal property.

Smalls entered politics as a delegate to South Carolina's constitutional convention of 1868 and in the same year won election as a Republican to the state's general assembly. He served in that body until 1875, first as a representative and later as a state senator. In 1874 Smalls was elected congressman from South Carolina's Fifth District, which included Beaufort. During his second congressional term in 1877, a South Carolina jury convicted him of accepting a bribe while he served in the state senate. Smalls had chaired the Printing Committee, which parceled out the state's printing. Evidence suggested that a leading printer bribed Smalls in return for state business. The judge sentenced Smalls to three years in the state penitentiary at hard labor. Smalls protested his innocence and appealed, losing before the state supreme court. He appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but before the case could be resolved, the Democratic governor, William D. Simpson, pardoned him in exchange for a federal agreement to drop an investigation into the Democrats' violation of election laws.

With his conviction blighting his reputation and the Democratic paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts terrorizing his constituents, Smalls lost a third bid for Congress in 1878. He ran again in 1880 but lost in an election characterized by fraud on the part of the Democrats. This time Smalls contested the result, and the House awarded him the seat. In 1882 he failed to receive his party's nomination after Democrats redistricted Beaufort into the Seventh District. When the victorious Republican died in office in 1884, however, Smalls was elected to serve the remainder of the term, and he won reelection to another term later in the year. He lost the seat permanently in 1886, as Democrats threw out ballots with impunity and extralegal violence kept black voters from the polls.

Hannah Smalls died in 1883, and Robert married Annie Wigg in 1890. They had one son before her death in 1895. Effectively excluded from local politics by the Democrats' electoral fraud and the state's disenfranchisement of African Americans in 1895, Smalls remained active in the Republican Party at the national level. Those contacts gained him appointment as collector of customs for the Port of Beaufort in 1889, a post he lost with the Democratic national victory of 1892. He regained the office in 1898 with the return of a national Republican administration. He served until 1913, despite growing lily-white sentiment in the Republican Party and the difficulties of discharging his duties in now-segregated Beaufort. Beset by several grave illnesses, Smalls died there, disillusioned by the reversal of the African American political gains for which he had worked in Reconstruction.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

processed xml | source xml