Black Dispatches - Robert Smalls' Achievements

Robert Smalls' Achievements

A second piece of important naval intelligence concerned the strategic Confederate port of Charleston, South Carolina, one of a few ports in the south with railroad lines capable of speedy transportation of supplies to Richmond and other key Confederate manufacturing and supply centers. In March 1862, a free black American, Robert Smalls, rowed out to a Union warship that was part of a large fleet assembled to attack the seacoast town of Fernandina, Florida. He reported that Confederate troops were preparing to evacuate the town as well as Amelia Island, which guarded the approach to Fernandina. Smalls, a harbor pilot, had observed Confederate preparations to destroy the town's harbor facilities during the withdrawal.

Smalls understood the importance of keeping the Fernandina harbor operable as a logistics facility and base for Union operations against Charleston. Based on the intelligence he provided, Union forces attacked Fernandina and routed the enemy's rear guard before the Confederates could sabotage the harbor. The intelligence provided by Smalls was considered so significant that the Secretary of the Department of the Navy described it in detail to President Lincoln in the Secretary's annual report.

While this information was Smalls' greatest intelligence contribution to the Union, he subsequently provided another gift to the Navy. On the night of May 12, 1862, he, family members, and other black American crewmen of the Planter, a cargo steamer turned into an armed coastal patrol ship, sailed out of Charleston harbor after the captain and two mates had gone home. In the dark, Smalls pretended to be the captain and, from his previous experiences, was able to provide all the correct countersigns to challenges from the various harbor fortifications. Upon reaching ships forming the Union blockade, he surrendered the Planter to them. Later that month he and his fellow crewmen received payment from the US government for half the appraised value of the ship as a reward.

When Pinkerton left his position as chief of intelligence for the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, he took all his intelligence files on the Confederacy with him (because he had been a private contractor, the files belonged to him). This left Union forces without centralized Confederate order-of-battle information, and the one remaining intelligence officer in the Army of the Potomac had to travel to the War Department in Washington to re-create this information from records of previous battles.