From the American Battlefield Trust.
Robert Smalls eased the vessel away from the pier and backed into the harbor. The night air was still, and Smalls could smell the sea life as his ship churned up the brackish water and turned southeast. As Smalls passed the Confederate batteries, he took note of the soldiers standing their watches as he had a hundred times before.
When the ship entered the main channel, Smalls looked around and was comforted to see his family and many of his friends on board with him. Moving faster toward the open sea in the first light of dawn, Smalls must have felt the freedom and exhilaration that only the master of a ship at sea can truly feel.
Except that this was not Smalls' ship; and he was not quite a free man.
Robert Smalls was born into slavery in 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina,. As a boy, he worked with his mother in the relative comfort of their owner's home on the plantation. His mother had worked hard in the fields, so she made sure that Robert witnessed the horrors that other slaves endured.
When Smalls turned 12, at his mother's request, the owner sent Robert to nearby Charleston to be hired as a worker. Smalls worked at odd jobs around thecity as a lamplighter, a stevedore and in a hotel, where he met Hannah Jones Robert and Hannah were married in 1856 and they had two children.
--Old B-Runner
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