Smalls was aboard during the engagement. He was piloting one of the most advanced vessels in the Union fleet in an assault on one of the most heavily defended positions on the eastern seaboard, and the vessel was sinking under him. The battle and the sinking are documented; the specific experience of being a pilot on a failing ironclad under concentrated Confederate fire is not the kind of experience that produces detailed written records in the moment. What the record shows is that he was there, that the engagement was intense and dangerous, and that he survived it.
The episode illustrates something specific about his wartime service: he was not merely a harbor pilot in a support role. He was present at major engagements, in vessels that were taking significant fire, doing the specific work of getting vessels where they needed to go in conditions that made that work both technically demanding and personally dangerous. The seventeen engagements he later described himself as having been part of were not bureaucratic appearances. They were combat operations.
## After the Firing Stopped: The April 1865 Return
The April 14, 1865 ceremony at Fort Sumter — the flag-raising that marked the fourth anniversary of the Confederacy’s capture of the fort and its return to Union control — was a carefully staged piece of wartime symbolism.
The Union had arranged for Major Robert Anderson, who had commanded Fort Sumter when the Confederacy attacked in April 1861, to return and raise the same flag that had been lowered four years earlier. The ceremony drew politicians, military figures, dignitaries, and the press. It was designed to mark the effective end of the Confederate military effort, though Lee’s surrender at Appomattox would not occur until two days later, on April 9.