His great-great-grandson, Michael B. Moore, was the Democratic nominee for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district in 2024 — the same coastal South Carolina that Smalls had represented more than a century earlier.
## The Ship That Was Also a Statement
What the Planter represented, in the spring and summer of 1862, was more than a captured vessel. It was a demonstration, arrived at through the specific knowledge of people who had been forced to acquire that knowledge in service of others.
The Confederate military had built its harbor defenses around an assumption: that the enslaved people who crewed its vessels were instruments rather than agents. That the man at the wheel was an implement, not a person who was paying attention and making plans. The defensive architecture of Charleston Harbor in 1862 was not primarily designed to prevent enslaved people from escaping with the ships they operated; it was designed to prevent Union naval assault. The signals that Smalls knew were military security measures against the blockade, not against the crew.
This gap in Confederate assumption was exactly what Smalls exploited. The forts at the harbor’s mouth were looking outward, watching for Union ships approaching. The Planter was already inside, giving the right signals, moving at the right speed, with a figure in the captain’s coat standing at a visible position on deck. The architecture of surveillance was pointed the wrong way.
The intelligence value of what Smalls brought to Du Pont went beyond the code book and the minefield charts. He could describe, from direct knowledge, what the Confederates were watching for and what they were not. He had been inside the defensive structure for months. He knew what assumptions it rested on. That knowledge, offered to Union commanders, was of a different order than anything they could have captured in a naval engagement.