It would be incorrect to say that Smalls was entirely forgotten or that historians ignored him. Scholarly accounts have maintained him in the historical record continuously. Edward A. Miller Jr.’s biography was published in 1995, Andrew Billingsley’s in 2007, and Cate Lineberry’s popular account in 2017 brought him to a wider audience. What is true is that he was less present in the general public’s understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction than his record justifies, and that the correction of this absence is ongoing rather than complete.
The reasons for his relative absence from popular accounts of the Civil War are not mysterious. The dominant popular narrative of the Civil War in the twentieth century centered on white military figures — Grant and Lee, Sherman and Jackson — and on events that those figures shaped directly. The role of Black participants in the war — as soldiers, as spies and intelligence sources, as the people whose freedom was ultimately what the war was about — was systematically underweighted in this narrative. Smalls fit awkwardly into that narrative because his most significant contribution to the Union war effort came before Black soldiers were officially authorized, in a form — harbor piloting, intelligence gathering, self-organization — that did not fit the category of military heroism that the dominant narrative was organized around.
He was also a Reconstruction-era politician, and Reconstruction itself was presented in the dominant twentieth-century narrative as a period of carpetbagger excess and Black incapacity that the Redemption movement had appropriately ended. This narrative — which was the Dunning School’s interpretation, taught in textbooks and dramatized in films like The Birth of a Nation — treated Reconstruction politicians like Smalls as corrupt or incompetent or both. The scholarly demolition of the Dunning School interpretation was accomplished progressively through the mid-twentieth century and continues, but popular reception of scholarly revisions moves slowly.