The Curious Robert Smalls

I went to see a lecture by Robert Smalls, the dashing Negro hero, at the Union Club during the war. I had read a number of articles about his daring escape with his steamship from Charleston harbor, under the very guns of the Confederates. I was not really prepared for what I found.

Smalls was a compact and slender young man, nothing in appearance like the rotund Congressman I met in later years. He had a shiny, new suit of clothes, somewhat a challenge to come by in those war years, and he was well-groomed and well-mannered. But his appearance, as a jet-black man with shining, white eyes and teeth, and his parted hair rising from his head like a sage bush, was rather startling, frankly. It was as if a wild man from the jungle had been dressed meticulously by a Fifth Avenue haberdasher for an evening on the town.

When he stood to speak, there was no fear in him. There was no visible stage fright, even though the assemblage must have contained some four- to five-hundred persons. He spoke in a loud, clear voice, with an infectious smile and an immediately disarming sense of humor. He had then, at that young age, the politician's innate ability to make you feel instantly his friend, and to make you feel you agreed with him in all things.

He spoke with the accent and the clear diction of a Southern gentleman. One might close one's eyes and think Jefferson Davis were addressing the meeting. The sight was so incongruous!

Smalls seemed to harbor no animosity towards those who had held him in bondage. I found this interesting. I had attended lectures by abolitionists in the past, where the horrors of slavery, the depravity and cruelty of the lash, the indiscriminate rupturing of family ties, were recounted vividly by those who had survived them first hand.

Yet Smalls spoke not at all of these aspects of his earlier life. I wondered if he had in fact led some sort of charmed existence in his youth, one that allowed him to speak and think and act as if he were a free man rather than a slave.

His earlier career had been as a seaman, first as a rigger, then as a deck hand, and for many years as a pilot (or a wheelman, as he called it) on steamers along the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In this manner, although he was a slave, he seems to have become accustomed to the authority of command and decision-making. He spoke with all the confidence of a sea captain, of one who has faced challenges far beyond those presented by the drawing room or the lecture hall.

He was basking in his newfound notoriety, and one could see an occasional absence of humility. As he was such a young man, it was easy to overlook. It would have been less appealing in an older man.

The other thing I remember from his lecture was his religiosity. The man seemed to have the most profound Christian faith. I understand the only religion allowed by the slave holders among their Negro charges is that based upon the Apostle Paul's admonition to slaves to serve their masters willingly. As Paul was a slave of Christ, so should the loyal Negro be to his white master.

Yet Smalls seemed to hold to a Christianity that did not need him as a slave. He described his fervent prayer as he piloted the steamship out of the harbor, past the forts and mines that would almost certainly blow him and his fellow fugitives to eternity. As he described the situation, it was the most desperate of endeavors. There was virtually no way they could escape. Any rational man could see that, and Smalls seemed to be the most rational of men. If, by some small chance, they were not killed by the guns or the exploding mines, they would have been publicly tortured to death upon their capture. Indeed, because of this, they took an oath not to be captured alive.

Yet Smalls's faith and his constant prayer overcame this rationality and this fear. There was in the man a most irrational belief in deliverance by the Almighty- the same Almighty who had delivered him, at his birth, into servitude, and who had held him, his loved ones, his forebears, in said condition quite without hope of recourse up to that point.

Now Smalls had taken matters into his own hands, and he prayed throughout his journey for deliverance by this same God.

Against all reason, Smalls attributed his deliverance entirely to that God. He attributed none of it to his own daring, courage, and skill.

Smalls said these things with the conviction of the revivalist giving his testimony. He meant to convert the incredulous in the audience, to bring any lingering unbelievers back to Christ.

I must admit, for the moment, at least in my case, he came close to succeeding.

For years afterward, I have envied him that faith. I find myself conversing with him in my imagination as the years go by, probing and arguing the great questions of existence with that young man who believed so strongly and so absolutely.

I wonder now, in his old age- if he is still alive- if he still holds to that faith- after his destruction at the hands of his enemies- after the near re-enslavement of his people- after nearly every prominent national politician has adopted the stance that he and his fellow Negroes are an inferior and dangerous race that must be kept in their proper place, deprived of most of the rights granted to them by an all-consuming war, constitutional amendments, and- can I resist the irony?- by their Almighty God himself.