Robert Smalls

Smalls was born enslaved in Beaufort and hired out as a boy to the Charleston waterfront, where he learned to handle boats and, crucially, watched the harbour pilots. In May 1862 he was serving as wheelman on the armed transport Planter. At three in the morning, with the white officers ashore, he put on the captain's straw hat, took the ship out past five Confederate forts giving the correct signals at each, collected his wife and children and the families of the other crewmen from a rendezvous, ran up a white sheet and surrendered the vessel to the Union blockade.

He handed over the ship, its guns and the Confederate signal book, and the story was used to argue successfully that Black men should be allowed to enlist. He became a Union captain, and afterwards bought the house in Beaufort in which he had been enslaved. He served five terms in the United States Congress, wrote the provision that gave South Carolina free compulsory public schooling, and lived long enough to see the constitution of 1895 take the vote away again. He is buried behind the church his family had attended.