Smalls piloted the Planter to the ceremony carrying African American passengers who had made the journey to witness the moment. The specific identities and number of those passengers are not fully documented in the sources available for this article, but the fact of their presence — people who had been enslaved under the Confederacy, who were now free in a practical if not yet fully legal sense, traveling to Fort Sumter on the vessel that Robert Smalls had taken out of Charleston three years earlier — has a symbolic density that is not diminished by acknowledging that it was also just a boat trip to a ceremony.
The Planter that arrived at Fort Sumter in April 1865 was not the same vessel that had left Southern Wharf in May 1862 in any terms except the physical. The political meaning of the ship, and of the man at its wheel, had been transformed by the three intervening years. The war had not ended enslavement by the logic of moral argument; it had ended it through military and political force, and the people who had been enslaved had not been passive observers of that process. They had been participants in it — through armed service, through intelligence provision, through self-organization, through the kind of documented individual action that the Planter’s escape represented.
Smalls was present at the ceremony as a man whose name the Northern press had known for three years, who had piloted Union vessels through seventeen significant engagements, who had taken command of this same ship when its captain fled. He was thirty-five years old. He had six months of federal service remaining before his discharge on June 11, 1865.