September 14, 2021 • 25 mins
Born into slavery, Robert Smalls dreamed of freedom for not just himself and his family, but all oppressed people. As the US became consumed in the Civil War, he hatched a daredevil plan to make this dream a reality -- by stealing a Confederate ship and sailing straight past the southern authorities all the way to the Union. In part one of this episode, the guys explore the origin of Robert Smalls, the genesis of his plan, and the moment he knew there was no turning back.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in over on the zoom call.
Here we've got our super producer, the one and only
Max Williams. Give him a hand, give him to give
him three? How many hands? Who do who? And who's that?
Who's that hood? Who went over there? That's that's me,
old Brown? Oh, I said my last name. I think
(00:47):
I've ever said that. My last name is in fact Brown.
For anyone that didn't know, um, you ever watched the
Great British Baking Show or The Great British Bake Off?
Is it as somehow? Sometimes I referred to I do oh,
I should introduced myself. I'm beat, I've forgotten that part. Yes,
who who is? Who is who? I was directing that question?
So so I have, Like many people, I find it relaxing.
(01:11):
It was sort of. It's it's got a what you
would call its head lasso vibe that really does you
know what? It really does? Yeah, and my boy Noel
Fielding from the Mighty Bush. Very controversial decision to install
him as the comic relief on that show alongside Um
Matt Lucas I think is his name, who was in
Little Britain, but no Fielding bit of a weirdo and
(01:33):
I love the fact that he goes over there. Yeah, totally, totally.
He's one of my favorite. He's he's one of the
few guys with my name that is, you know, looms
large in pop culture. The other one is Noel Gallagher
who's kind of a jerk, so definitely expent to old
Fielding has he though he's put us through a lot.
You know what even is a wonder wall Um. I
only bring this up bench because they do a thing
(01:55):
on on the Great British Speaking Show where every week
it's like a different theme. They've a biscuit week or
trumpet week or pie week or whatever Japanese week. Well,
you know what we're doing that they don't own that,
they don't own that, then we're gonna do that. What
what we what week is it for us? We are
We're introducing a theme this week which is historical heist. Uh.
(02:18):
These are as you know, a long time ridiculous historians.
We love a good hist tale. In the heist, you
can see uh, this cinematic scope of humanity. You can
see the highs the lows. You can see inspiration, you
can see villainy. And we thought, you know, we would
today kick off this week by having a story that
(02:42):
is technically a heist, but it's it's a heist, maybe
not in the way you would expect. It's a story
of inspiration, it's a story of audacity, ambition, it's ultimately
a story about freedom, and it's an amazing story that
we feel very fortunate to share with you. Uh, there
is a guy we'd love to introduce you to. His
(03:04):
name is Robert Smalls. So Robert Smalls if you've never
heard of him. Um, let's make it cinematic. Let's lean
into this. So there is a great like opening scene
from a book called Be Free or Die, the amazing
story of Robert Small's escape from slavery to Union hero.
(03:25):
And no, you wanna you want to kick us off here,
let's let's set this up and and Max, you're gonna
lean on your amazing sound design powers. Okay, So that
the logos popped up right, rh blah blah blah blah blah,
and then we fade out and it's nighttime, darkness still
(03:50):
blanketed the city of Charleston in the early hours of
May eighteen sixty two, m As a night breeze carried
the bridy scent of marshes across the quiet harbor, only
the occasional ringing of a ship's bell competed with the
(04:13):
sounds of waves lapping against the wooden wharf. We're a
Confederate side wheeled steamer named the Planter was moored the
wharf stood a few miles from Fort Sumter. Were the
(04:36):
first shots of the Civil War and fire just a
little more than a year before. H As thin wisps
of smoke rise from the vessel's smokestack high above the
pilot house, a twenty three year old enslaved man named
(05:02):
Robert Smalls stood on the deck. In the next few hours,
he and his young family with either fine freedom from
slavery or face certain death. Yeah, I think we stopped there.
(05:25):
This is the moment, and we want you to have
that image burn in your mind and keep it here,
because this is about to be the defining decision of
this young man's life. Let's learn a little bit about him,
and let's learn about what led him to this moment.
There on May thirt so Robert Smalls is born on
(05:46):
April five, eighteen thirty nine. UH. He is born on
a state on a plot of land at five eleven
Prince Street in Beaufort, South Carolina. He has born into slavery.
His mother, Lydia, was in the house at the time,
but she grew up working the fields, and she was
(06:06):
not from this town originally. She had been taken from
her own family when she was just nine years old.
The story of Small's father is largely lost to history.
There are a few suspects, or there are a few
suspected patriarchs, but none have been clearly identified. We know that,
(06:28):
at least according to some great work by historians Quota
with PBS, we know that the slaver family the McKee family.
The patriarch of them was John McKee. For some reason,
they seemed to favor young Robert over the other enslaved
children that were living on the property, and that causes
(06:48):
some historians to speculate that perhaps John McKee was Robert's
biological That's all the detail that caused historians to lean
most in that direction. Uh And speaking of historians, highly
recommend checking out Henry Lewis Gates Juniors article on PBS.
It's actually a transcript of a series that this historical,
wonderful historian did called the African Americans Many Rivers to
(07:12):
Cross Um. So you can find that on PBS dot
org just search for Robert Small's Henry Lewis Gates. Don't
want to read you the headlined quite yet because it's
kit of a spoiler. But you're right then, a lot
of times the history of family lineage in these slave
situations were lost to history for obvious reasons. Yeah, and
(07:34):
this was by design in some cases. Here's the thing.
He he had, He had friends, and he would hang
out with him, and he would be pushing the envelope
against some of the draconian rules over class and behavior
in this community. Most notably, he ignored the curfew that
(07:59):
was set for all black people in town and he
would hang out with his white friends. His mother was very,
very worried about this because she thought he would grow
up without fully understanding the horrors of slavery, and so
she intended to give him a tough education. She said, look,
(08:22):
he has to go work in the fields for a while.
And he asked to watch people as they are being
whipped and being being whipped in this time. Make no,
make no mistake, It's not the same as like apparent
spanking a kid with their hand. This is a traumatic,
incredibly dangerous thing to do to someone. You can lead
(08:43):
to death, that will leave scars, right, so, absolutely so
when he saw this. According to his great granddaughter, who
would talked about this later in an historian w Marvin Delaney,
Robert ended up in the Beaufort jail pretty frequently. And
(09:04):
eventually his mom tries something else and she says, Okay,
she goes to the McKay family and she says, I'm
worried about my son's safety. Can you sent him to
Charleston and so he can work there. It's a bigger town, right, uh.
And it's a different town, and so the McKee family
ends up moving to Charleston too. And when when Robert's
(09:26):
about twelve years old, he's hired as a day laborer
working on the waterfront and he eventually becomes a sailor,
which is sort of the first step towards this big story.
And he's lived a lot of life by the time
he's nineteen. Let's see what was he up tonal Right,
by this very young age, he had held down quite
(09:48):
a few different jobs at various skill levels, but some
of them included a lamplighter, which is exactly what it
sounds like, a Steve Dore forman Steve a door for men,
which is essentially UM an early version of what we
would call a longshoreman, someone who was responsible for loading
and unloading cargo from merchant ships. Uh. He also was
(10:10):
a waiter, again being shown a little bit of preferential
treatment here considering UH he was allowed to keep a
dollar of his fifteen dollar a week wages UM. His owner,
of course, took the rest. And he was able to
kind of learn a lot from these jobs from listening,
(10:30):
you know, especially the waiter job. He was able to
kind of figure out who everyone was in the community.
People would pass to the restaurant, and he began to
learn a lot about who who was who within the
um sports kind of hierarchy here in Charleston. There were
very few people, according to Gates the story we talked
(10:52):
about in Charleston, who knew more about the harbor than
Robert Smalls, and that just came from him literally keeping
his ear so open. So around eighteen fifty six he
met his wife there in Charlestown. Um, Hannah is what
(11:13):
her name was. And she was a slave that belonged
to the Kingman family. Uh. And she worked at a
hotel there in Charleston, and Robert got the owner's permission
to marry her, and the two then moved in together
into an apartment and had two children, Elizabeth and Robert Jr.
(11:33):
And even though they were kind of granted this permission
to marry, they knew that it was possible that they
would be asked they would be forced to you know,
separate um, depending on the nature of the work, or
if the family that owned one or both of them
decided they wanted to move. So Smalls asked the owner
of his wife if he could just buy his family,
(11:58):
which would have been at a very dear cost at
the time, around eight hundred dollars. He only had around
a hundred though at the time, and proposed that he
would save up the other seven hundred after making that
down payment. Yeah, and for Max, could we get some
inflation calculator action fired up here there? It is okay, good, Yeah,
(12:25):
it takes this a second, folks, the further we go
back in time. So just for comparison, eight hundred dollars
was just under thousand, four hundred dollars today, So this
was this was steep, especially when you consider that this
guy was able to save money despite only receiving one
(12:45):
of his pay the other fourteen dollars each week. Is
it's insanely going to This guy's doing nothing. He's doing
nothing on the docks, so so this price, it's crazy,
and he is rightly wondering how long is it going
to take me to save up this other seven hundred dollars.
(13:08):
He's thinking this, by the way, during the Civil War,
because he was hired as a deckhand in March of
eighteen sixty one on that Confederate supply ship. From the
very beginning of our story, the Planter. The Planter was
back in the day, it had been a cotton steamer,
but it got converted to carry supplies between forts in
(13:31):
the Charleston Harbor. And so just the way that Robert
learned everything about the Charleston Docks, he learned everything he
could about steering and running this steamer, running the Planter,
and he began to brainstorm slowly over time way a
(13:52):
way to escape the heist began to form in his head.
So let's fast forward. It's spring. It's a sixty two.
This is the second full year of the U. S.
Civil War. Smalls is still working aboard the Planter, and
he has learned a lot of stuff. He's also very
(14:13):
cognizant that he is working for the enemy, for the
people who want to keep him enslaved. Right, It's not
like he had a choice though, you know, no, no,
And so he learns how to steer the boat, he
learns how to plant sea mines, he learns the codes
and the signals that you need as a vessel to
(14:34):
safely pass Confederate forts. Uh. And he becomes familiar as
ship becomes familiar to these locations. And yeah, and there's
a really great mental Flass article about this topic as
well by Lucas Riley highly recommended checking that out for
some additional details. But there was this was a time
when I think the writing was somewhat on the wall
(14:56):
that the the Union was going to win out. They
were doing some pretty significant blockades of Confederate supply vessels,
and this is something that Smalls was very much aware of, right.
He sees these blockades of Union ships, and by this
point in the war, these blockades are are a regular thing, right,
(15:16):
the Union forces are cutting off supplies, and if you're
in if you're in Confederate lands at this time, then
depending on your position in society, those blockades can represent
very different things. So the many of the white Confederates
and supporters of the Confederate Army, they, without a hint
(15:38):
of self awareness or irony, saw these blockades as oppressive
to people who were actually being oppressed. To actual enslaved people,
these ships represented not oppression, but they represented the possibility
of freedom. And so Smalls knew that due to the war,
(16:01):
Union naval commanders have been accepting runaways, like if you
could make it to Union Land, then you would have
a chance of being free. And so he knew he
couldn't pay for you know, he knew he couldn't save
up another seven hundred dollars anytime soon. So he thought,
(16:22):
what if, what if we can pull a heist? What
if we can steal ourselves? For last better phrase, and
this is something like we've got this cinematic moment if
we go back to the film. This is from that
mental phlass article you just mentioned. The uh there was
a captain of this ship, and this captain was a
white guy's named C. J. Reliat, and he had this
(16:45):
wide brimmed straw hat and it was kind of like
his thing, you know how like in some places the
boss has their funny coffee mug or whatever. He was
known for his hat. So picture this moment in the
film where there's another crew member, also an enslaved person,
the cap and out away doing something and this this
guy grabs the hat and he puts it on Small's
head and a Small as again remember he's only like
(17:07):
in his early twenties, and he says, you look just
like the captain. And then that's when Falls is looking
out at the ocean. He's looking pass Fort Sumter and
he's seen that those Union ships in the distance, and
then it dawns on him he could steal the planter.
He could actually do it. Smalls was probably one of
(17:36):
the most skilled of all of them. He was what
was considered the wheelman because he was a slave, he
was not able to have any kind of rank, and
typical of this time period, you know, the white captain
didn't really do a whole heck of a lot except, like,
you know, occupy that official role. But it was really
Smalls that was doing all of the steering, so he
(17:58):
knew exactly what to do, and he knew how he
could use that likeness to kind of create a diversion. Right. So,
late in the evening of May to the planner returned
to Charleston after a two week supply expedition. The White
crew were supposed to stay on board to you know,
keep an eye on the the enslaved crew, but um,
(18:22):
they were scheduled for another mission the next day, and
they wanted to get a little bit of shore leave
time in. They wanted to you know, sleep in a
comfortable bed, you know, maybe in a hotel, maybe have
the company of a woman or something like that. Um.
You know, these guys were definitely ready for a night
(18:42):
on the town. So they left the boat. Um, and
they trusted the enslaved crew members to take care of it,
because that's what they always did. They always took care
of everything of including steering the actual ship. Um. Captain
Relia did the same thing under threat of court marshal,
Like this is a big deal. This would have been
considered abandoning his post or what is it called going
(19:05):
a wall ben right away without leave. Yeah, yeah, if
he was, if he was caught not manning the boat,
then it would clearly be a dereliction of duty. But
he had been relaxing, right. They had done a successful
two week run, so he, like the other white officers,
are in town to unwind. And once they get to shore,
(19:29):
Robert turns to his fellow crew members and he says, Okay,
it's go time. Essentially, that's not a verbatim quote, by
the way, I don't think people said it's go time
back then, but you get the gist of what we're saying.
And he's very honest about the dangers involved, and he
(19:50):
says that you know, I have no intention of being
taken alive. Being captured is not an option for this operation.
We will escape and we will use whatever guns and
ammo you have on board to fight if necessary. And
if worst comes to worst, we are sinking this ship.
(20:10):
So now is your chance. He basically says, are you
in or are you out? And two people in the
crew said it's too dangerous for one reason or another,
maybe family, maybe fear bodily harm. They said they were
gonna stay behind. And so after that, after everybody had
confirmed whether they were in or out, Robert Smalls takes
(20:33):
the skipper's jacket, he puts it on. He takes that
obnoxious straw hat and he puts the signature signature moment
picture the swelling crescendo as he orders the crew. Now
he's captain, and he says, light the boilers. So they
light the boilers, and at two am the planter starts
(20:53):
sneaking out into the Charleston Harbor. Perfect. It's a perfect plan.
I mean, the whole crew. Anyone that would have said
anything about this, they were probably pissed drunk at this point,
you know, including the captain. Um, there's really I mean,
once they got into the harbor, certainly plenty was going
to go wrong, but they absolutely had the perfect opportunity,
(21:15):
which they ceased. Uh So Smalls starts to steer the
ship to a rendezvous point where he was going to
pick up his wife and kids, along with a handful
of other enslaved people. Um, he had sent word to
his family of this possibility so that they would be
(21:35):
waiting and ready, and ready they were. They got scooped
up and were off. And there is a report from
a newspaper account of this. Uh quote from Hannah herself,
who said this, the whole party had solemnly agreed in
advance that if pursued and without hope of escape, the
ship would be scuttled and sunk, essentially going down with
(21:59):
the ship. They would like, you know, this whole idea
of not being taken alive, and they should all take hands,
husband and wife, brother and sister and jump overboard and
perish together. Wow. Yeah, and she says. This was also
reported afterwards. According to the the accounts that were written
of this escape, Hannah reportedly told Robert, it is a risk, dear,
(22:24):
but you and I and our little ones must be free.
I will go for where you die. I will die,
which is profound. And the crew was, you know, like
we said, they were more than capable and more than
willing to fight back if they were discovered, exposed and
pursued because this boat was a supply ship, so it
(22:46):
has two rounds of ammunition, they've got five large guns,
and if cornered, they decided in advance that they would
take dynamite to the boiler because if they you know,
if they die and if they take the ship down
with them, then they're they're removing that ship from the war,
so they're not just dying they're also injuring the Confederate Forces,
(23:10):
which is very important. So no, I am pretty sure
we're onto something. This should be a film. This definitely
has to be a two parter. I think we've we've
got a heist another week for highst week. I think so,
and we've got one for you. But in the meantime,
we're gonna close this one out. We've got some nice
background for you, and we'll be back in just a
couple of days with the heisty part of the superhisty
(23:33):
part of this high story. So don't feel too let
down in the meantime. Huge thanks to Max Williams super
producer extraordinaire brother Alex Williams, who composed this theme. Big
big thanks to Christopher Hasiotis, Big big thanks to Gabe Lousier.
Big thanks of course to Casey Pegraham and um, maybe
(23:54):
not a big thanks, but like a a medium thing
to Jonathan Strictland. Oh there we go. That's like the
just like when Dill Murray called Chevy Chase medium talent exactly. Yeah.
I also heard a really funny story about Martin Short
and Steve Martin. Apparently, when Martin Short visited Steve Martin's
(24:15):
house for the first time he saw he had all
these incredible paintings like Picasso's and hoppers and all that,
and he goes, gosh, how are you this rich? I've
seen your work. ULLU. We will We will be back, folks.
Tune in for the second part of the story. We
cannot wait to go on this journey with you. And
also let us know, by the way, some of your
(24:37):
favorite heist You can do that by going to Ridiculous
Historians on Facebook, or you can do it by sending
sending us an email or sending Max Milan email. It's
gonna happen, Then it's gonna happen three eventually that email
is ridiculous At iHeart media dot com, We'll see you
next time, folks. Yeah. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
(25:05):
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in over on the zoom call.
Here we've got our super producer, the one and only
Max Williams. Give him a hand, give him to give
him three? How many hands? Who do who? And who's that?
Who's that hood? Who went over there? That's that's me,
old Brown? Oh, I said my last name. I think
(00:47):
I've ever said that. My last name is in fact Brown.
For anyone that didn't know, um, you ever watched the
Great British Baking Show or The Great British Bake Off?
Is it as somehow? Sometimes I referred to I do oh,
I should introduced myself. I'm beat, I've forgotten that part. Yes,
who who is? Who is who? I was directing that question?
So so I have, Like many people, I find it relaxing.
(01:11):
It was sort of. It's it's got a what you
would call its head lasso vibe that really does you
know what? It really does? Yeah, and my boy Noel
Fielding from the Mighty Bush. Very controversial decision to install
him as the comic relief on that show alongside Um
Matt Lucas I think is his name, who was in
Little Britain, but no Fielding bit of a weirdo and
(01:33):
I love the fact that he goes over there. Yeah, totally, totally.
He's one of my favorite. He's he's one of the
few guys with my name that is, you know, looms
large in pop culture. The other one is Noel Gallagher
who's kind of a jerk, so definitely expent to old
Fielding has he though he's put us through a lot.
You know what even is a wonder wall Um. I
only bring this up bench because they do a thing
(01:55):
on on the Great British Speaking Show where every week
it's like a different theme. They've a biscuit week or
trumpet week or pie week or whatever Japanese week. Well,
you know what we're doing that they don't own that,
they don't own that, then we're gonna do that. What
what we what week is it for us? We are
We're introducing a theme this week which is historical heist. Uh.
(02:18):
These are as you know, a long time ridiculous historians.
We love a good hist tale. In the heist, you
can see uh, this cinematic scope of humanity. You can
see the highs the lows. You can see inspiration, you
can see villainy. And we thought, you know, we would
today kick off this week by having a story that
(02:42):
is technically a heist, but it's it's a heist, maybe
not in the way you would expect. It's a story
of inspiration, it's a story of audacity, ambition, it's ultimately
a story about freedom, and it's an amazing story that
we feel very fortunate to share with you. Uh, there
is a guy we'd love to introduce you to. His
(03:04):
name is Robert Smalls. So Robert Smalls if you've never
heard of him. Um, let's make it cinematic. Let's lean
into this. So there is a great like opening scene
from a book called Be Free or Die, the amazing
story of Robert Small's escape from slavery to Union hero.
(03:25):
And no, you wanna you want to kick us off here,
let's let's set this up and and Max, you're gonna
lean on your amazing sound design powers. Okay, So that
the logos popped up right, rh blah blah blah blah blah,
and then we fade out and it's nighttime, darkness still
(03:50):
blanketed the city of Charleston in the early hours of
May eighteen sixty two, m As a night breeze carried
the bridy scent of marshes across the quiet harbor, only
the occasional ringing of a ship's bell competed with the
(04:13):
sounds of waves lapping against the wooden wharf. We're a
Confederate side wheeled steamer named the Planter was moored the
wharf stood a few miles from Fort Sumter. Were the
(04:36):
first shots of the Civil War and fire just a
little more than a year before. H As thin wisps
of smoke rise from the vessel's smokestack high above the
pilot house, a twenty three year old enslaved man named
(05:02):
Robert Smalls stood on the deck. In the next few hours,
he and his young family with either fine freedom from
slavery or face certain death. Yeah, I think we stopped there.
(05:25):
This is the moment, and we want you to have
that image burn in your mind and keep it here,
because this is about to be the defining decision of
this young man's life. Let's learn a little bit about him,
and let's learn about what led him to this moment.
There on May thirt so Robert Smalls is born on
(05:46):
April five, eighteen thirty nine. UH. He is born on
a state on a plot of land at five eleven
Prince Street in Beaufort, South Carolina. He has born into slavery.
His mother, Lydia, was in the house at the time,
but she grew up working the fields, and she was
(06:06):
not from this town originally. She had been taken from
her own family when she was just nine years old.
The story of Small's father is largely lost to history.
There are a few suspects, or there are a few
suspected patriarchs, but none have been clearly identified. We know that,
(06:28):
at least according to some great work by historians Quota
with PBS, we know that the slaver family the McKee family.
The patriarch of them was John McKee. For some reason,
they seemed to favor young Robert over the other enslaved
children that were living on the property, and that causes
(06:48):
some historians to speculate that perhaps John McKee was Robert's
biological That's all the detail that caused historians to lean
most in that direction. Uh And speaking of historians, highly
recommend checking out Henry Lewis Gates Juniors article on PBS.
It's actually a transcript of a series that this historical,
wonderful historian did called the African Americans Many Rivers to
(07:12):
Cross Um. So you can find that on PBS dot
org just search for Robert Small's Henry Lewis Gates. Don't
want to read you the headlined quite yet because it's
kit of a spoiler. But you're right then, a lot
of times the history of family lineage in these slave
situations were lost to history for obvious reasons. Yeah, and
(07:34):
this was by design in some cases. Here's the thing.
He he had, He had friends, and he would hang
out with him, and he would be pushing the envelope
against some of the draconian rules over class and behavior
in this community. Most notably, he ignored the curfew that
(07:59):
was set for all black people in town and he
would hang out with his white friends. His mother was very,
very worried about this because she thought he would grow
up without fully understanding the horrors of slavery, and so
she intended to give him a tough education. She said, look,
(08:22):
he has to go work in the fields for a while.
And he asked to watch people as they are being
whipped and being being whipped in this time. Make no,
make no mistake, It's not the same as like apparent
spanking a kid with their hand. This is a traumatic,
incredibly dangerous thing to do to someone. You can lead
(08:43):
to death, that will leave scars, right, so, absolutely so
when he saw this. According to his great granddaughter, who
would talked about this later in an historian w Marvin Delaney,
Robert ended up in the Beaufort jail pretty frequently. And
(09:04):
eventually his mom tries something else and she says, Okay,
she goes to the McKay family and she says, I'm
worried about my son's safety. Can you sent him to
Charleston and so he can work there. It's a bigger town, right, uh.
And it's a different town, and so the McKee family
ends up moving to Charleston too. And when when Robert's
(09:26):
about twelve years old, he's hired as a day laborer
working on the waterfront and he eventually becomes a sailor,
which is sort of the first step towards this big story.
And he's lived a lot of life by the time
he's nineteen. Let's see what was he up tonal Right,
by this very young age, he had held down quite
(09:48):
a few different jobs at various skill levels, but some
of them included a lamplighter, which is exactly what it
sounds like, a Steve Dore forman Steve a door for men,
which is essentially UM an early version of what we
would call a longshoreman, someone who was responsible for loading
and unloading cargo from merchant ships. Uh. He also was
(10:10):
a waiter, again being shown a little bit of preferential
treatment here considering UH he was allowed to keep a
dollar of his fifteen dollar a week wages UM. His owner,
of course, took the rest. And he was able to
kind of learn a lot from these jobs from listening,
(10:30):
you know, especially the waiter job. He was able to
kind of figure out who everyone was in the community.
People would pass to the restaurant, and he began to
learn a lot about who who was who within the
um sports kind of hierarchy here in Charleston. There were
very few people, according to Gates the story we talked
(10:52):
about in Charleston, who knew more about the harbor than
Robert Smalls, and that just came from him literally keeping
his ear so open. So around eighteen fifty six he
met his wife there in Charlestown. Um, Hannah is what
(11:13):
her name was. And she was a slave that belonged
to the Kingman family. Uh. And she worked at a
hotel there in Charleston, and Robert got the owner's permission
to marry her, and the two then moved in together
into an apartment and had two children, Elizabeth and Robert Jr.
(11:33):
And even though they were kind of granted this permission
to marry, they knew that it was possible that they
would be asked they would be forced to you know,
separate um, depending on the nature of the work, or
if the family that owned one or both of them
decided they wanted to move. So Smalls asked the owner
of his wife if he could just buy his family,
(11:58):
which would have been at a very dear cost at
the time, around eight hundred dollars. He only had around
a hundred though at the time, and proposed that he
would save up the other seven hundred after making that
down payment. Yeah, and for Max, could we get some
inflation calculator action fired up here there? It is okay, good, Yeah,
(12:25):
it takes this a second, folks, the further we go
back in time. So just for comparison, eight hundred dollars
was just under thousand, four hundred dollars today, So this
was this was steep, especially when you consider that this
guy was able to save money despite only receiving one
(12:45):
of his pay the other fourteen dollars each week. Is
it's insanely going to This guy's doing nothing. He's doing
nothing on the docks, so so this price, it's crazy,
and he is rightly wondering how long is it going
to take me to save up this other seven hundred dollars.
(13:08):
He's thinking this, by the way, during the Civil War,
because he was hired as a deckhand in March of
eighteen sixty one on that Confederate supply ship. From the
very beginning of our story, the Planter. The Planter was
back in the day, it had been a cotton steamer,
but it got converted to carry supplies between forts in
(13:31):
the Charleston Harbor. And so just the way that Robert
learned everything about the Charleston Docks, he learned everything he
could about steering and running this steamer, running the Planter,
and he began to brainstorm slowly over time way a
(13:52):
way to escape the heist began to form in his head.
So let's fast forward. It's spring. It's a sixty two.
This is the second full year of the U. S.
Civil War. Smalls is still working aboard the Planter, and
he has learned a lot of stuff. He's also very
(14:13):
cognizant that he is working for the enemy, for the
people who want to keep him enslaved. Right, It's not
like he had a choice though, you know, no, no,
And so he learns how to steer the boat, he
learns how to plant sea mines, he learns the codes
and the signals that you need as a vessel to
(14:34):
safely pass Confederate forts. Uh. And he becomes familiar as
ship becomes familiar to these locations. And yeah, and there's
a really great mental Flass article about this topic as
well by Lucas Riley highly recommended checking that out for
some additional details. But there was this was a time
when I think the writing was somewhat on the wall
(14:56):
that the the Union was going to win out. They
were doing some pretty significant blockades of Confederate supply vessels,
and this is something that Smalls was very much aware of, right.
He sees these blockades of Union ships, and by this
point in the war, these blockades are are a regular thing, right,
(15:16):
the Union forces are cutting off supplies, and if you're
in if you're in Confederate lands at this time, then
depending on your position in society, those blockades can represent
very different things. So the many of the white Confederates
and supporters of the Confederate Army, they, without a hint
(15:38):
of self awareness or irony, saw these blockades as oppressive
to people who were actually being oppressed. To actual enslaved people,
these ships represented not oppression, but they represented the possibility
of freedom. And so Smalls knew that due to the war,
(16:01):
Union naval commanders have been accepting runaways, like if you
could make it to Union Land, then you would have
a chance of being free. And so he knew he
couldn't pay for you know, he knew he couldn't save
up another seven hundred dollars anytime soon. So he thought,
(16:22):
what if, what if we can pull a heist? What
if we can steal ourselves? For last better phrase, and
this is something like we've got this cinematic moment if
we go back to the film. This is from that
mental phlass article you just mentioned. The uh there was
a captain of this ship, and this captain was a
white guy's named C. J. Reliat, and he had this
(16:45):
wide brimmed straw hat and it was kind of like
his thing, you know how like in some places the
boss has their funny coffee mug or whatever. He was
known for his hat. So picture this moment in the
film where there's another crew member, also an enslaved person,
the cap and out away doing something and this this
guy grabs the hat and he puts it on Small's
head and a Small as again remember he's only like
(17:07):
in his early twenties, and he says, you look just
like the captain. And then that's when Falls is looking
out at the ocean. He's looking pass Fort Sumter and
he's seen that those Union ships in the distance, and
then it dawns on him he could steal the planter.
He could actually do it. Smalls was probably one of
(17:36):
the most skilled of all of them. He was what
was considered the wheelman because he was a slave, he
was not able to have any kind of rank, and
typical of this time period, you know, the white captain
didn't really do a whole heck of a lot except, like,
you know, occupy that official role. But it was really
Smalls that was doing all of the steering, so he
(17:58):
knew exactly what to do, and he knew how he
could use that likeness to kind of create a diversion. Right. So,
late in the evening of May to the planner returned
to Charleston after a two week supply expedition. The White
crew were supposed to stay on board to you know,
keep an eye on the the enslaved crew, but um,
(18:22):
they were scheduled for another mission the next day, and
they wanted to get a little bit of shore leave
time in. They wanted to you know, sleep in a
comfortable bed, you know, maybe in a hotel, maybe have
the company of a woman or something like that. Um.
You know, these guys were definitely ready for a night
(18:42):
on the town. So they left the boat. Um, and
they trusted the enslaved crew members to take care of it,
because that's what they always did. They always took care
of everything of including steering the actual ship. Um. Captain
Relia did the same thing under threat of court marshal,
Like this is a big deal. This would have been
considered abandoning his post or what is it called going
(19:05):
a wall ben right away without leave. Yeah, yeah, if
he was, if he was caught not manning the boat,
then it would clearly be a dereliction of duty. But
he had been relaxing, right. They had done a successful
two week run, so he, like the other white officers,
are in town to unwind. And once they get to shore,
(19:29):
Robert turns to his fellow crew members and he says, Okay,
it's go time. Essentially, that's not a verbatim quote, by
the way, I don't think people said it's go time
back then, but you get the gist of what we're saying.
And he's very honest about the dangers involved, and he
(19:50):
says that you know, I have no intention of being
taken alive. Being captured is not an option for this operation.
We will escape and we will use whatever guns and
ammo you have on board to fight if necessary. And
if worst comes to worst, we are sinking this ship.
(20:10):
So now is your chance. He basically says, are you
in or are you out? And two people in the
crew said it's too dangerous for one reason or another,
maybe family, maybe fear bodily harm. They said they were
gonna stay behind. And so after that, after everybody had
confirmed whether they were in or out, Robert Smalls takes
(20:33):
the skipper's jacket, he puts it on. He takes that
obnoxious straw hat and he puts the signature signature moment
picture the swelling crescendo as he orders the crew. Now
he's captain, and he says, light the boilers. So they
light the boilers, and at two am the planter starts
(20:53):
sneaking out into the Charleston Harbor. Perfect. It's a perfect plan.
I mean, the whole crew. Anyone that would have said
anything about this, they were probably pissed drunk at this point,
you know, including the captain. Um, there's really I mean,
once they got into the harbor, certainly plenty was going
to go wrong, but they absolutely had the perfect opportunity,
(21:15):
which they ceased. Uh So Smalls starts to steer the
ship to a rendezvous point where he was going to
pick up his wife and kids, along with a handful
of other enslaved people. Um, he had sent word to
his family of this possibility so that they would be
(21:35):
waiting and ready, and ready they were. They got scooped
up and were off. And there is a report from
a newspaper account of this. Uh quote from Hannah herself,
who said this, the whole party had solemnly agreed in
advance that if pursued and without hope of escape, the
ship would be scuttled and sunk, essentially going down with
(21:59):
the ship. They would like, you know, this whole idea
of not being taken alive, and they should all take hands,
husband and wife, brother and sister and jump overboard and
perish together. Wow. Yeah, and she says. This was also
reported afterwards. According to the the accounts that were written
of this escape, Hannah reportedly told Robert, it is a risk, dear,
(22:24):
but you and I and our little ones must be free.
I will go for where you die. I will die,
which is profound. And the crew was, you know, like
we said, they were more than capable and more than
willing to fight back if they were discovered, exposed and
pursued because this boat was a supply ship, so it
(22:46):
has two rounds of ammunition, they've got five large guns,
and if cornered, they decided in advance that they would
take dynamite to the boiler because if they you know,
if they die and if they take the ship down
with them, then they're they're removing that ship from the war,
so they're not just dying they're also injuring the Confederate Forces,
(23:10):
which is very important. So no, I am pretty sure
we're onto something. This should be a film. This definitely
has to be a two parter. I think we've we've
got a heist another week for highst week. I think so,
and we've got one for you. But in the meantime,
we're gonna close this one out. We've got some nice
background for you, and we'll be back in just a
couple of days with the heisty part of the superhisty
(23:33):
part of this high story. So don't feel too let
down in the meantime. Huge thanks to Max Williams super
producer extraordinaire brother Alex Williams, who composed this theme. Big
big thanks to Christopher Hasiotis, Big big thanks to Gabe Lousier.
Big thanks of course to Casey Pegraham and um, maybe
(23:54):
not a big thanks, but like a a medium thing
to Jonathan Strictland. Oh there we go. That's like the
just like when Dill Murray called Chevy Chase medium talent exactly. Yeah.
I also heard a really funny story about Martin Short
and Steve Martin. Apparently, when Martin Short visited Steve Martin's
(24:15):
house for the first time he saw he had all
these incredible paintings like Picasso's and hoppers and all that,
and he goes, gosh, how are you this rich? I've
seen your work. ULLU. We will We will be back, folks.
Tune in for the second part of the story. We
cannot wait to go on this journey with you. And
also let us know, by the way, some of your
(24:37):
favorite heist You can do that by going to Ridiculous
Historians on Facebook, or you can do it by sending
sending us an email or sending Max Milan email. It's
gonna happen, Then it's gonna happen three eventually that email
is ridiculous At iHeart media dot com, We'll see you
next time, folks. Yeah. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio,
(25:05):
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!