He was also present for a smaller but significant episode in 1864, when he was ordered off a streetcar in Philadelphia and chose to leave rather than ride on the open platform reserved for Black passengers. He later cited this incident publicly. The Pennsylvania legislature passed a law integrating public transportation in 1867, and accounts connecting that law to the Philadelphia streetcar episode — including Smalls’s experience — have become part of the documented record of his civilian activism during the war years.
In Philadelphia during that same period, Smalls learned to read and write. He had reached his mid-twenties without formal literacy, because literacy for enslaved people in South Carolina was illegal and dangerous. The harbor, the signals, the navigation — all of it had been learned and held in memory and body rather than on paper. In Philadelphia, with access to education for the first time, he closed a gap that the system of enslavement had deliberately imposed.
He was discharged on June 11, 1865, shortly after the war’s end. He returned to Beaufort, South Carolina, where his story did not end but transformed.
## Beaufort and the Property on Prince Street
The address is 511 Prince Street, Beaufort, South Carolina. It is a substantial house — the kind of house that a prosperous family of the antebellum South built to reflect its position. Henry McKee, the man who had enslaved Robert Smalls’s mother Lydia and who had, in the practice of the time, held authority over Robert himself from his birth, had lived there.