Robert Smalls died on February 23, 1915. He was buried at Tabernacle Baptist Church in downtown Beaufort, where his grave is marked and where a monument stands in his memory. The grave is in Beaufort because he lived in Beaufort. He lived in Beaufort because he came back there, to the place where his mother had been enslaved and where he had been born, and stayed.
The harbor is nearby. It is always nearby in Beaufort. The Cooper River and the Ashley converge into Charleston Harbor forty miles up the coast, where the Planter once ran and where the forts still stand. The water that Robert Smalls knew better than almost any person alive in 1862 is still there, moving with the tides it has always moved with, carrying vessels that the people aboard them steer by instruments Smalls never had.
He did not need instruments. He knew the water.
That knowledge, earned under the worst possible conditions and then used for the best possible purpose, is what began the story. Everything that followed — the wartime service, the home purchased, the schools opened, the votes cast, the terms served, the decades of resistance to what was being done to his community and to the legal order he had helped build — followed from a man who knew his harbor and understood that knowing it gave him a way out.
He took it. He brought sixteen people with him. He spent the rest of his life trying to build a country where that kind of escape would not be necessary — where freedom was a legal fact that the law actually protected, not a risk that people had to take in the dark, past armed forts, in the hours before dawn.