Robert Smalls (April 5, 1839 – February 23, 1915) was an American politician who was born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina. During the American Civil War, the still enslaved Smalls commandeered a Confederate transport ship in Charleston Harbor and sailed it from the Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the U.S. blockade that surrounded it. He then piloted the ship to the ...

Jan 9, 2025 · COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A group studying where to put South Carolina’s first Statehouse monument to an individual African American has decided Robert Smalls’ statue should be staring down a notorious white supremacist who dismantled most of the former slave’s work after the Civil War.

Smalls declared his innocence and hoped to appeal his conviction—which came with a three-year sentence—to the Supreme Court. In the end, however, he failed to clear his name because the South Carolina’s Democratic governor struck a deal with Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes to pardon Smalls if the U.S. government agreed to drop ...

Feb 17, 2019 · After three days in jail, Smalls was released pending his appeal with the state supreme court.” In 1879, South Carolina governor William Simpson pardoned Smalls for the alleged bribe.

Mar 6, 2024 · Home of Robert Smalls in Beaufort, SC, that had belonged to his former master. Smalls' purchase of the house was contested in court and was decided in his favor by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jan 9, 2019 · He was the second-longest serving African-American member of Congress (behind his contemporary Joseph Rainey) until the mid-20th century. In 1890 he was appointed by President Benjamin Harrison as collector of the Port of Beaufort, which he held until 1913. Smalls was active into the twentieth century.

Jun 21, 2017 · The US Supreme Court ruled in favor of Smalls thus deciding the validity of all the wartime property tax sales in South Carolina. Robert Smalls lived in this house throughout his busy political career as state legislator, state senator and five-term U.S. Congressman.

Aug 24, 2018 · In the midst of the Civil War, Smalls overtook a Confederate boat filled with 17 other enslaved people and steered it to freedom. This extraordinary act was the first of many, as Smalls spent the rest of his life fighting for equality and justice.

Smalls, an 1879 case from Port Royal, South Carolina, the Supreme Court declared that titles to land that had been sold in “insurrectionary districts” for federal tax delinquency during the Civil War would be considered presumptively valid.

William DeTreville (who had bought the house in the 1850’s from the McKee’s) tried to claim the house after the War but the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the tax sale to Robert Smalls, who lived there until his death at age 75 in 1915.