Charleston Harbour, South Carolina, 1862.
In the early morning hours, under a blanket of fog and darkness,
a man named Robert Smalls is staging a daring escape from slavery.
Smalls had been forced to work as pilot on
a prized confederate navy ship called the CSS Planter.
That night, all of the white officers on the ship
had decided to spend the night on shore with their families.
This created an enticing and dangerous opportunity for escape.
At this time, the American Civil War had been raging for a year
and Union forces had blockaded entry and exit from Charleston.
The city and its port were a crucial lifeline for Confederate forces in the south.
While the blockade was a burden for the Confederacy,
it meant that freedom for Smalls was just on the other side of the harbour.
Because of slavery, he knew that his family
could be separated from him in an instant.
He knew that they could be sold away, or he could be sold away.
And like any father who loved his family, loved his wife,
loved his children, he tried to think of ways that he could protect his family.
Smalls devised a cunning plan: Commandeer the ship,
get his family on board, and use the cover of night
to sail straight out the front door of Charleston to freedom.
At any place along this way, had things gone wrong,
it would have been tragic.
At that point in time, because of runaways
and because they were on this war footing, there were always patrols.
He came up with a plan to, in the middle of the night, put on
the top hat and overcoat of a Confederate captain.
Because he was the pilot of the [CSS] Planter,
he knew all of the various passcodes that he would have to execute
on the ship's whistle to get past the various forts in Charleston Harbour.
They had managed to traverse the harbour un-harassed,
but the last hurdle they had to face before freedom was the most dangerous.
They had to check in at the fearsome Fort Sumter,
a massive military fortress at the entrance to the harbour.
He stood in a specific place
on the boat that didn't bring any type of suspicion to him,
which allowed him navigate, at that point, beyond the guns of Fort Sumter.
However, once outside the harbour, they faced a new threat:
They were piloting a Confederate war ship heading straight for Union forces.
It was an enormous surprise to the United States soldiers
who were stationed on the ships there to see, first of all,
one of the largest Confederate boats steaming toward them
with this enormous Confederate flag. Robert had thought
of all the details of how to get to freedom
and was just about there, he was on the precipice of freedom,
but had forgotten a detail that could have gotten them blown out of the water.
But luckily, my great-great grandmother
Hannah had remembered to sow together a number of white sheets,
and so they quickly lowered the Confederate flag
and raised the white sheets of surrender
and sailed up toward the USS Onward.
After arriving to the north, Smalls was hailed as a hero for his exploits.
Newspapers wrote about him,
and he was even awarded prize money for bringing the Planter to the north.
He could have lived a very comfortable life
as a Civil War hero up in the north,
but the same dream that he had for himself to be free
he then went back and fought for others like him.
After the war and the end of slavery, Smalls returned
to his native Beaufort, South Carolina and used some
of his prize money to purchase his former slave master's house.
He became a prominent businessman and started participating in politics.
He was one of the founders of the South Carolina Republican Party,
and was elected as the first black member of the House
of Representatives of South Carolina and later the United States.
One of the first things that you see is that in 1868, he is involved
in writing a new constitution for the state of South Carolina.
He actually wrote the legislation that created the first free,
compulsory, state-wide public school system in America.
During his political tenure, he was steadfast in advocating
for expanded social services and civil rights.
Smalls served five terms as a congressman in Washington
and was often the target of concerted campaigns designed to curb
African American representation in politics.
As a result of political wrangling in the Reconstruction period,
many protections gained by recently emancipated African Americans were rolled back.
Then black folks basically went back to positions of almost complete servitude.
They became non-citizens; they couldn't vote.
Despite Smalls' marginalisation in his later life,
his story is one of the most profound in the history of
African American emancipation and American democracy as a whole.
It makes you think about the gains that he advocated for,
and the challenges that he faced,
and African Americans had to overcome to have a lieutenant governor
of the state of South Carolina who was African American,
to have members of Congress in South Carolina who were African Americans.
At the same time, I think the fact that many
of the gains that Robert fought so hard for were taken away at the end,
I think that is the perfect illustration of the fact that
people of goodwill have to be steadfast.