Stealing a Warship to Escape Slavery

Robert Smalls’s daring dash to freedom during the American Civil War

Ben Kageyama

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CSS Planter (1862), Wikimedia Commons

AtAt the turn of the 19th century, Robert Smalls was a Congressman and a distinguished war hero known throughout the United States. However, only a couple of decades earlier, he was a slave working on a Confederate boat called the CSS Planter.

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