nap covil war navy union blockade map civil war

Gunboat DeckhandĪt the outbreak of the Civil War, in March 1861, Smalls was hired as a deckhand on the Confederate supply ship the Planter, a converted cotton steamer that carried supplies between forts in Charleston Harbor.

Smalls's attempts to buy his wife and family out of slavery failed. Jones already had one daughter, and together she and Smalls had a daughter and a son, Robert Jr., who later died of smallpox. In 1856, he married Hannah Jones, an enslaved hotel maid who worked in Charleston. When Smalls was 12, the McKee family moved to Charleston, where Smalls was hired as a day laborer on the waterfront, working as a rigger and eventually a sailor. On several occasions, he ignored the night curfew for Black people and stayed out with his white companions, much to his mother’s lament. Smalls was raised in the McKee house and enjoyed a little more acceptance in the community. The identity of his father is not officially known but believed to be Henry McKee, the son of the plantation’s owner. Smalls was born to a house enslaved person, Lydia Polite, in Beaufort, South Carolina, on April 5, 1839. House of Representatives in 1875 but was convicted of taking a bribe while in the state senate and sentenced to prison before he was pardoned by the governor. After the war, he became a successful businessman and politician serving in both houses of the South Carolina legislature. Robert Smalls was an enslaved African American who escaped to freedom in a Confederate supply ship and eventually became a sea captain for the Union Navy.

Nap covil war navy union blockade map civil war