Du Pont wrote to the Secretary of the Navy. He described Smalls as “the intelligent slave and pilot of the boat, who performed this bold feat so skillfully,” and said he was superior to any person who had come into Union lines. This is a contemporary record from a senior Union naval officer, and it captures something specific: what Du Pont was recognizing was not merely courage but professional competence. Smalls had done something technically skilled. The praise was not for the audacity alone but for the execution.
Northern newspapers and magazines picked up the story within days. The New-York Tribune reported it. Harper’s Weekly ran an illustration. The escape became, almost immediately, a significant story in the North — a story of self-emancipation by enslaved people who had used their own professional skill and knowledge to reach freedom, turning the tools of their enslavement against the system that had imposed it.
In the South, Confederate newspapers demanded an accounting for how this had been allowed to happen. Captain Relyea and the other white officers who had been ashore that night faced scrutiny for the breach of protocol that had made the escape possible.
Congress passed a private bill on May 30, 1862, awarding Smalls and his crew half the officially appraised value of the ship and cargo as prize money. The official valuation was $9,000. Smalls’s share came to $1,500 — a sum that one contemporary source noted was substantially below what the actual market value of the vessel and its cargo would have suggested. A 1900 congressional settlement paid additional amounts, though the total remained contested.