Smalls’s arrangement with McKee included the expectation that he would remit a substantial portion of whatever he earned. The dollar a week he kept was a small fraction of what the city’s labor market paid for his skill. The remainder went to McKee, in Beaufort, as the ongoing financial return on the human property McKee had inherited or acquired.
The $800 purchase price for his family’s freedom that Smalls had been working toward is documented in accounts of his pre-escape period. The figure was not an abstraction but a specific negotiated sum — the price at which Hannah and their children could be legally freed, if Smalls could accumulate that much. He was trying. He was not close. The trajectory of saving $1 a week against an $800 target — while the people he was saving for could be sold or separated at any moment, while he had no legal protection for the savings themselves — is a mathematical representation of what the system was designed to prevent.
The escape changed the arithmetic entirely. It also changed the risks: now he was no longer trying to accumulate savings, he was trying to get sixteen people through five Confederate defensive positions before anyone noticed what they were doing.
## The Confederate Response and What It Revealed
The Confederate response to the escape of the Planter was documented in the Southern press and in military records that have been studied by historians.
The most immediate response was embarrassment. A Confederate Army transport, armed, carrying artillery and ammunition, had been piloted out of one of the most heavily defended harbors in the Confederacy by its enslaved crew while the white officers were ashore. The episode was a direct consequence of Confederate officers violating their own regulations by leaving the vessel overnight with no white supervision. Captain Relyea and his officers faced scrutiny for the breach.