‘Be Free or Die’: True story of a slave who rocked boat

Robert Smalls gains place as one of history’s heroes

Reading Cate Lineberry’s Be Free or Die (St. Martin’s, 231 pp., eeeE) is a little like recovering a national heirloom that was lost, stolen or buried through decades.

It recounts the amazingbecause-it’s-all-true story of how an African-American slave named Robert Smalls led his family and other enslaved people on a daring escape almost a year after the Civil War began, by piloting a Confederate steamer out of South Carolina and toward Union waters. In doing so, the book serves to remind us that black people were active, daring and, often, successful agents in securing their own freedom.

Smalls was 23 years old and a married father of two small children when, in the early morning hours of May 13, 1862, he and seven other enslaved blacks serving on the CSS Planter pulled the ship from its Charleston port, stopping along the way to pick up Smalls’ family and those of some of the other fugitive crewmen.

Smalls wore a captain’s uniform and a straw hat similar to the one worn by the ship’s captain, who along with the other white crew members left the ship the night before unattended, except by the slaves. Thus attired, Smalls, mimicking what he knew to be the captain’s regular motions, was able to guide the Planter northward through a gauntlet of five Confederate harbors.

A Union ship was about to fire at the vessel until its captain and crew saw a white bed sheet flying as a flag of surrender. Upon boarding the ship, Union Navy officers found that it not only had a ship in captivity, but also four artillery pieces, 200 pounds of ammunition and, most important, a code book with valuable intelligence about mines and torpedoes in Charleston Harbor and enemy signals.

All that is covered in the book’s first chapter. The rest mostly concerns itself with the reverberations of Smalls’ death-defying gamble.

Be Free or Die maintains a tautly rendered perspective on the complex social dynamics of Civil War-era race relations, especially in the North, where its embrace of emancipation was warmer than whites’ embrace of newly freed blacks.

But Smalls’ heroism was so widely hailed that he got to meet President Lincoln and other cabinet members and military leaders.

There are no specific details about that meeting, just as there are no specifics available in historic records about Smalls beyond chronicles of his cool, resolute heroism while serving as a civilian pilot of Union warships.

He even piloted the Planter out of danger after its “brawny white” Union captain abandoned his post in panic when the ship came under heavy fire. (Smalls immediately was appointed its new captain.)

With each account of Smalls’ progress, up to his postwar political success as one of the first African Americans elected to the House of Representatives, one’s admiration for his seemingly imperturbable drive grows. And yet, something about his personality, the character that gave him such a cool head and an unconquerable will, remains just out of reach.

It’s not the fault of Be Free or Die, which deserves credit for restoring his name and his achievements to public attention. If we’re going to find out more or at least engage in educated guesses, that may require navigation by dramatists, novelists and other imaginative artists.

Smalls’ heroism was so widely hailed that he met President Lincoln and other cabinet members and military leaders.

JOY LYN PHOTOGRAPHY Cate Lineberry tells of a hero.