Before dawn on 13 May 1862, Robert Smalls, an enslaved harbor pilot, took the Confederate transport Planter from its berth at Southern Wharf, the southernmost of the old East Bay wharves on the Cooper River, and delivered it to the Union blockade. The ship's three white officers, Captain Charles Relyea, first officer Samuel Hancock and engineer Samuel Pitcher, had gone ashore for the night. At about 3 a.m. the enslaved crew got up steam and left the wharf, then went up the Cooper River to the North Atlantic Wharf, where their wives and children were hidden aboard another steamer, the Etiwan. Sixteen people were on board when the Planter headed for the channel, among them Smalls's wife Hannah and their children.
Smalls wore Relyea's coat and straw hat and gave the expected whistle signals as the 147-foot sidewheeler passed Castle Pinckney, Fort Johnson and, at about 4:15 a.m., Fort Sumter. Beyond the forts the crew struck the Confederate flags and raised a bedsheet, and the USS Onward, whose commander first took the Planter for an attacker, let it come alongside.
Smalls gave Union commanders knowledge of Charleston's defenses, including a signal codebook, and in 1863 became captain of the Planter. After the war he bought his former enslaver's house in Beaufort, served in the South Carolina legislature and was elected to Congress in 1874. A 2012 South Carolina historical marker at 40 East Bay Street places the seizure at a wharf just east of that address.
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