The school he opened after the war, in a two-story building in Beaufort, and the teacher he hired to run it, were one specific form of what the community needed. The 1868 constitutional convention’s provision for compulsory public education was a systemic attempt to make what Smalls’s privately funded school offered available to every child regardless of whether they had access to private resources. The convention’s educational provisions were among the most lasting achievements of South Carolina’s Reconstruction government, and they did not survive intact into the post-Reconstruction period, but they established a precedent that the states’ eventual public education systems had to respond to.
## The Wartime Hero and the Political World
The gap between Robert Smalls’s national reputation in 1862 and 1863 and the conditions he faced in the 1870s and 1880s is one of the more striking features of his biography.
He became famous immediately. Northern newspapers ran his story within days of the escape. Harper’s Weekly illustrated it. He was received by President Lincoln. He testified before Congress in 1862 about the potential for arming Black soldiers, an advocacy visit that preceded General Hunter’s authorization to enlist Black troops and that Smalls and Reverend French made specifically to the Secretary of War. The argument they made — that Black men would fight for the Union if given the opportunity, that the Union was leaving a resource untapped — was borne out almost immediately by the conduct of the Black regiments that followed.
By 1863, he was an established figure in Union naval operations off the South Carolina coast, known to senior commanders and trusted with significant responsibilities. His December 1, 1863, decision to take command of the Planter rather than surrender to Confederate forces — a decision he made because he believed surrender would mean his crew would be killed rather than taken prisoner — was recognized officially by General Gillmore. The pattern of Confederate treatment of captured Black soldiers that informed Smalls’s calculation was documented in the Fort Pillow massacre of April 1864, where Confederate forces under General Nathan Bedford Forrest killed a large number of Black Union soldiers after they attempted to surrender. Smalls’s December 1863 decision — made months before Fort Pillow but responding to the same pattern — reflected an accurate reading of the risks that Black soldiers and sailors faced when they fell into Confederate hands.