## The Planter’s Last Night
On March 25, 1876, Robert Smalls watched the Planter go down for the last time. The ship that had carried sixteen people to freedom on a May morning in 1862, that had served the Union through three more years of war, that had been the vessel aboard which he had refused to surrender and had taken command — that ship was beached in a storm and could not be saved.
The report that he said the loss felt like losing a family member is not from a contemporary written record but from a later account. It may be family memory. It may be an approximation of something said or felt. What it points toward seems plausible in human terms: a person who had been through everything that had been through that ship would not be indifferent to its end.
The wreck lay somewhere in the waters off South Carolina for more than a century. NOAA’s 2014 announcement that it believed it had located the site was reported in the national press. The physical vessel, or what remains of it, is back in the water where it once moved.
Robert Smalls lived for thirty-nine years after the Planter sank. He went to the 1895 constitutional convention. He served as customs collector. He intervened in 1913 to stop a mob. He died in 1915.
He was buried in Beaufort. His mother Lydia’s grave was nearby.
The harbor is still there. The channel between Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie is roughly where it was in 1862. People who travel to Charleston by water go through it without necessarily knowing what moved through it in the early morning hours of May 13, 1862 — a sidewheel steamer, a man in a captain’s coat, sixteen people who had decided that freedom was worth the risk.