Fun Facts About Robert Smalls
Notas do episódio
Robert Smalls was an amazing hero of the American Civil War. He gained his freedom and helped the war effort by orchestrating a daring escape aboard the Confederate steamer CSS Planter in May 1862. Working as an enslaved wheelman aboard the ship the twenty-three-year-old Smalls took advantage of the ship's white officers sleeping ashore, disguised himself in the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat, picked up his family and fellow crew members, and navigated past five Confederate checkpoints in Charleston Harbor to surrender the ship and valuable military intelligence to the Union naval blockade. Classified legally as a "contraband of war," Smalls received congressional prize money, met with President Abraham Lincoln to advocate for the enlistment of Black soldiers, and went on to pilot armed Union vessels. In December 1863, after refusing to surrender under heavy artillery fire in Folly Island Creek, he was appointed captain of the Planter, becoming the first African American to command a United States military vessel.
Following the Civil War, Smalls championed civil rights, public education, and political reform throughout Reconstruction and the late nineteenth century. After being forcibly removed from a segregated streetcar in Philadelphia in 1864, he helped lead a three-year public boycott and lobbying campaign that resulted in Pennsylvania outlawing transit discrimination in 1867. Despite having been legally barred from learning to read as an enslaved youth, he mastered literacy as an adult and served as a delegate to South Carolina's 1868 Constitutional Convention, where he authored the resolution creating the state's first free, compulsory public school system. Smalls went on to serve in the South Carolina Legislature, won five terms in the United States House of Representatives, and purchased the Beaufort mansion where he had once been enslaved, later sheltering his former enslaver's impoverished widow until her death. His enduring legacy is commemorated across the military, including the Army vessel USAV Major General Robert Smalls and the Navy guided-missile cruiser USS Robert Smalls.
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