The NOAA announcement in 2014 that researchers believed they had located the Planter’s wreck was covered in the national press. The ship is, presumably, still there: a scatter of wooden planking and iron hardware in the shallow water off South Carolina, where it has been since March 26, 1876. The vessel outlasted the war by eleven years and was outlasted by its most significant pilot by thirty-nine years.
The material continuity between the ship’s Confederate service and its Union service, and between its operational period and its resting place on the sea floor, is a useful reminder that history does not dematerialize into symbol. Real things were involved: a real vessel with real dimensions, real steam engines, real guns. Real people piloted it and engineered it and hid below its decks. The tendency to turn the escape into metaphor — into a general statement about freedom or courage — is understandable but should not entirely displace the specific material facts of what happened on those waters.
## The Navy Pension and What It Took
One of the most revealing episodes in Smalls’s postwar life is the pension.
In 1883, a bill was introduced in Congress to place Robert Smalls on the Navy retired list, which would have given him a pension commensurate with his naval service. The bill did not pass. Contemporary accounts attributed the failure to racial opposition from members of Congress who were unwilling to place a Black man on the naval retired list as an official recognition of his service.