**Material limitations:** The precise exchange of signals at Fort Sumter is documented in terms of outcome (the Planter was passed) but not in precise physical detail in sources accessible for this article. Hannah Smalls’s reported statement is family tradition, not a verified contemporary document. The headcount of 16 is consistent across NPS and other institutional accounts but individual name-by-name attributions differ slightly across sources. The bribery conviction of 1877 is described in the article with contextual caution, as a full adjudication by current evidentiary standards is not possible from available records.
## The Weight of What He Carried Out
The code book that Robert Smalls brought out of Charleston Harbor on the morning of May 13, 1862, was not simply a document. It was the daily key to every Confederate communication on those waters — the steam-whistle sequences that identified vessels to sentries, the arrangement of signals between installations, the language of a defensive network that the Union had been trying to decode from outside the harbor for months. Smalls had been operating inside that network. He knew its logic. He brought the logic out with him.
Flag Officer Du Pont’s assessment of the military intelligence value was recorded in his official dispatch and has been quoted in both NPS materials and historical accounts. He described the pilot who brought the ship out as superior to any individual who had come into Union lines, and he meant this in operational terms: not as a moral judgment but as a statement about the quality and specificity of the intelligence Smalls possessed and was willing to share.