Tag: Robert Smalls

Events Celebrate Little Known Civil War Incident

On a foggy spring night 150 years ago, slave Robert Smalls commandeered a Confederate ammunition ship, steamed upriver to pick up family and friends, and then slipped past five Southern batteries on Charleston Harbor to reach Union blockade ships.

Smalls would return to Charleston a year later to pilot a Union ironclad in an attack on Fort Sumter, while after the war he served in the South Carolina General Assembly, the U.S. Congress and later as a federal customs inspector.

“His story, I think, is lost in the larger picture of the Civil War – Grant and Lee; Appomattox and Gettysburg. It’s important locally, but I would say it’s a story often overlooked,” said Carl Borick, the assistant director of the Charleston Museum.