Smalls and his black friends aboard the Planter also knew that the army had established a new experiment there. The black residents were permitted to live together without white owners or overseers under the protection of the Union army and navy. They grew and sold cotton and other crops and even built schools and acquired their own property.
News of the progress of this community reached Blacks in Charleston.
Around this time, in March 1862, Union Major General David Hunter, an abolitionist, took command of the Department of the South. On May 9, he issued a miltary order freeing slaves in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina. Although his order was quickly rescinded by President Abraham Lincoln as premature, Hunter began to recruit former slaves into volunteer infantry companies.
Word of Hunter's actions reached the slave community still under Confederate control. It seemed to Smalls that wherever the Union military went, freedom would be there as well.
--Old B-Runner
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