Robert Smalls lived an action-hero life. Why isn’t he a household name?

The life and legacy of Robert Smalls are the stuff of a made-for-TV movie. There’s the thrilling seizure of a Confederate ship, a literal vessel of freedom for a man born into slavery. His political career after the Civil War – first in the South Carolina statehouse and then in the halls of Congress in Washington – resulted in a legacy of free public education for all U.S. schoolchildren.

In a different world, Smalls would be a household name, mentioned in the same breath as Barack Obama and Harriet Tubman.

Last summer, that different world was the San Diego Comic-Con. 

Outside of the San Diego Convention Center, rebellion was in the air. Outside, the writers’ strike was at a fever pitch. Inside, an idea that began as a Kickstarter had manifested itself into a panel defined by a single word – DEFIANT.

Legion M was planning a graphic novel of Smalls’ story, with the hope of turning it into a feature film or TV series.

The idea to bring Smalls’ story to a larger audience was a no-brainer, explained Rob Edwards, a screenwriter for Disney’s Academy Award-nominated “The Princess and the Frog.” He was speaking on a panel that included one of Smalls’ direct descendants, Michael Boulware Moore, and actor and rapper Marvin “Krondon” Jones III.

“The more I researched into his life, the more I realized this man never bowed down from a challenge. The odds were always against him incredibly. And he was like, ‘Who else is gonna do this?’” Mr. Edwards said in a phone interview after Comic-Con. “That’s why you need to tell the story now. … We’re fighting for the same things that we were fighting for then.”

Smalls taught himself how to read and write after he won his freedom. In 1868, during the South Carolina Constitutional Convention, Smalls and an unprecedented majority of Black legislators crafted a policy that created the country’s first free public schools for all children. “All the public schools, colleges, and universities of this State supported by the public funds shall be free and open to all the children and youths of the State, without regard to race or color” was the phrasing drafted in the state’s constitution. 

Smalls’ life stands in opposition to all the people claiming Reconstruction was a failure because “‘these people’ do not have the intellectual, mental, cultural ability to govern themselves,” says Bobby Donaldson, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, who leads the school’s Center for Civil Rights History and Research. “Now, the crazy thing about that is Robert Smalls is almost a symbolic image of that sort of defiance. ... Here was someone who physically challenged all the narratives that were being thrown at Black people – that they lacked the capacity to fight, they lacked the capacity to serve, and they lacked the capacity to govern. And here’s Robert Smalls standing tall saying, I beg to differ.”

Library of Congress

A copy of a story in Harper's Weekly from June 14, 1862, includes captions that read, “Robert Smalls, captain of the gun-boat Planter” and "The gun-boat Planter, run out of Charleston, S.C., by Robert Smalls, May 1862.”

Capture of the CSS Planter

In April 1861, the Civil War began in Charleston with The Battle of Fort Sumter. The following fall, Smalls was assigned to steer an armed Confederate ship named the CSS Planter. In May 1862, Smalls planned his daring escape from slavery.

After he donned the captain’s apparel and picked up his family and the families of his enslaved crewmates, he guided the ship past five Confederate harbor forts, giving the correct steam-whistle signals at checkpoints. One last barrier remained to freedom: Smalls and his crew of seven had to sail past Fort Sumter, the most heavily guarded of the Confederate forts. 

“At about 4:15 a.m., the Planter finally neared the formidable Fort Sumter, whose massive walls towered ominously about 50 feet above the water. Those on board the Planter were terrified. The only one not outwardly affected by fear was Smalls,” the Smithsonian Magazine wrote. “As the Planter approached the fort, Smalls, wearing [the captain’s] straw hat, pulled the whistle cord, offering ‘two long blows and a short one.’ It was the Confederate signal required to pass, which Smalls knew from earlier trips as a member of the Planter’s crew.”

As the Planter approached the Union Army, there was still the matter of a Confederate gunboat closing the gap on “enemy” quarters. That’s where Smalls’ wife, Hannah, came in. Her savvy use of a white sheet to replace the Confederate flag created a makeshift flag of surrender. The Smalls had secured their own freedom and freedom for 14 others.

A likeness of the Planter rests in Mitchelville Freedom Park on Hilton Head Island, which Luana Graves Sellars, an activist and the founder of Lowcountry Gullah, frequents often. 

“His story is not just a story of someone escaping slavery. His story is about courage, determination,” Ms. Sellars says in a phone interview. “It’s about assimilating into a new society. It’s about sharing his skills towards the efforts of the Civil War being fought. It’s about the reconstruction of America, and it’s about grace.”

That grace was exemplified in a story that Ms. Sellars recounts in an online biography of Smalls. Many years after he secured his freedom, Smalls housed the family that enslaved him.

“After the war, and his distinguished service to both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy, Smalls returned to Beaufort, SC where at a tax sale, he bought the home that had been owned by the McKee family, his former owners,” Ms. Sellars’ account reads. The family was destitute. “In an extraordinary demonstration of a kind and forgiving heart, he allowed members of the McKee family to continue living in the house. Remarkably, he even allowed the matriarch, who had become senile, to continue to believe that she was still lady of the house until her death.”

For all Smalls’ swashbuckling efforts, his humanity is what endures, Ms. Sellars says.

“It reminds me of an African proverb – ubuntu – which means ‘I am because we are.’ I think that really embodies Robert Smalls and his legacy in that he knew that his work and his legacy could not just stop with him, that it needed to be part of the greater good for everyone,” she says.

Another stunning part of Smalls’ legacy? His proximity to literary giants such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois.

“In 1888, there’s a journalist who comes to Augusta and he talks about how quickly we forget history intentionally. He may even mention Robert Smalls and how people erase the promise of Reconstruction. ... The reporter was a man named Frederick Douglass,” Dr. Donaldson says. “And then he says that it is the obligation of Black people to challenge that history and to keep it alive.”

Mr. Edwards, the screenwriter, understands that folks won’t be reading the graphic novel or watching a film based on “dusty old history.” The goal is to present how a man named Smalls was larger than life.

“I always say the most heroic thing [Smalls] did was die of old age,” Mr. Edwards says. “He commandeered the Planter, and he had a bounty on his head,” that would be worth about $125,000 in today’s dollars. “Four thousand dollars for anybody who took him out, and that was the bounty placed on his head when he was 23. And still, he just passed away [at age 75] in his sleep.”