In January 1864, while the war was still ongoing, a Union tax commissioner’s sale offered properties that had been seized from Confederate landowners who had failed to pay federal taxes. Robert Smalls purchased the McKee house at 511 Prince Street for $665. His mother Lydia, who had worked in that house as an enslaved servant, now lived in it with her son.
The legal situation was not simple. Henry McKee’s heirs contested the purchase. The dispute worked its way through the courts, and the U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld Smalls’s ownership. The legal precedent established in that case extended beyond this single property; it became relevant to other disputes about properties sold through the tax commissioner process during the war and its immediate aftermath.
What Smalls did with the property after the legal question was settled says something specific about him that is worth noting without dramatizing. He allowed Jane McKee — the elderly widow of Henry McKee — to live in the house before her death. This was a choice. It was not legally required of him and it did not undo the injustice of what had come before. It was a human decision in a complicated set of circumstances, and different people have characterized it differently. It is documented that it happened.
His mother Lydia lived with him in that house for the rest of her life.
The house is now a National Historic Landmark. It stands at 511 Prince Street and is part of the documented landscape of Beaufort’s history.