Elizabeth Lydia Smalls survived the escape and lived a full life. She was the daughter at whose wedding, later in her life, her father spoke about what he had done and why. The wedding speech, in family accounts, connected his actions in 1862 to the life his daughter was now able to live. The relationship between what he risked and what she got to be — an adult woman, free, making choices about her own life — is the personal-scale version of what the escape meant.
## The Ship as Object and Symbol
The CSS Planter, renamed the USS Planter when it came into Union service, worked throughout the war as a Union transport and dispatch vessel in the same waters it had served as a Confederate one. The physical continuity of the ship — same hull, same engines, same sidewheels moving through the same harbor — but serving the opposite cause is a kind of material metaphor for what the war was about.
Smalls piloted the vessel for the Union after its capture, and the relationship between him and the ship continued through the war and into the early postwar period. When the ship was sold into commercial service in 1866, Smalls had no further operational connection to it. The vessel that he had taken out of Charleston in the dark, that he had refused to surrender in 1863, that he had brought back to Charleston for the April 1865 flag-raising, ended its service life in 1876, beached and broken by a storm on the South Carolina coast.