## The McKee House and What Home Meant
The physical fact of 511 Prince Street deserves more attention than it typically receives in accounts of Robert Smalls’s life, because what that house represented was not abstract.
Lydia Polite, Smalls’s mother, had worked in that house as an enslaved servant in the household of Henry McKee. She had given birth to Robert in a cabin on the property — the cabin at the address that is now a National Historic Landmark. The house and the property were the setting of her enslavement. They were the physical environment in which Smalls spent the early years of his life before being sent to Charleston at approximately age twelve.
When the Confederate tax commissioner put the property up for sale in January 1864 — because McKee, as a Confederate, had failed to pay federal taxes — Smalls had the resources to bid on it. He had prize money. He had a salary from his naval work. He bid and purchased the property for $665.
The subsequent legal challenge from the McKee heirs was resolved in Smalls’s favor by the United States Supreme Court. The precedent established in that decision affected not just Smalls’s title to his property but the broader question of the validity of tax commissioner sales across the former Confederate states. The legal argument that the McKee heirs made — that the property sale was invalid — if it had succeeded, would have invalidated a substantial number of property transfers made under similar circumstances. The Supreme Court’s decision upholding the sales was therefore significant beyond Smalls’s individual case.