The 1895 constitutional convention that was called to undo the 1868 constitution’s most important provisions was the answer, from those political forces, to what the 1868 convention had built. The gap between 1868 and 1895 — twenty-seven years — was the window in which Smalls’s political career operated and in which the Reconstruction experiment played out. What was built in those twenty-seven years was real and substantial. What was done to it in 1895 was also real and systematic.
## The Man at the Memorial
On May 13, 2023 — the 161st anniversary of the escape — South Carolina officially observed the first Robert Smalls Day. The state legislature had designated the date as a commemorative day, and observances were held in Beaufort and in Columbia. The anniversary is now part of the state’s official calendar.
A bill signed in 2024 authorized a statue of Robert Smalls at the South Carolina State House in Columbia. The State House also houses statues of John C. Calhoun and Ben Tillman — figures whose careers were built, in significant part, on the suppression of the rights that Smalls spent his career trying to establish and protect. The presence of a Smalls statue among them is not a resolution of the contradiction; it is a documentation of it. The same political tradition that produced Calhoun’s nullification doctrine and Tillman’s disfranchisement campaign produced the context in which Robert Smalls’s achievements were necessary.
The USS Chancellorsville’s renaming as USS Robert Smalls in 2023 is a different kind of institutional acknowledgment. A ship named after a battle of the Confederacy’s most brilliant tactical victory was renamed for a man who had turned a Confederate ship over to the Union. The renaming decision was contested within military and political circles, as such decisions tend to be. It was made nonetheless. Robert Smalls’s name is now on an active United States Navy ship.