Robert Smalls, from Harper's Weekly, June 14, 1862
Robert Smalls, an African Baptist from South Carolina who recently obtained his freedom from slavery by seizing the Confederate steamer Planter and making a daring escape through Confederate defenses at Charleston, has since provided valuable information to the United States Navy. Acting on Smalls’ knowledge of Confederate defenses of South Carolina’s coast, the Union Navy today captures, without resistance, an unguarded Confederate fortification on Stono River, deepening the gloom hanging over the South in the face of ongoing Union encroachments. The Union uses the fort as a base of operations on the South Carolina coast for the remainder of the war.
Meanwhile, the slow but steady tide of the United States’ disentanglement from African slavery inches forward. Prior to the war, Southern slave-holding U.S. congressmen had opposed efforts to distribute western lands to citizens, believing that western settlers, as free land owners, would add their voices and votes to abolitionist efforts. Minus Southern pro-slave votes in D.C., President Abraham Lincoln today signs the signed the Homestead Act, providing settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land, predicated on payment of a filing fee and a span of five years of continuous residence. Slavery in the West is now out of the question, and the Homestead Act thus opens a period of western migration and settlement of the West, in the coming decades changing the American landscape and re-distributing the nation’s population.
Sources: “Robert Smalls, 1839-1915” (link); “Operations in Stono River, May 20-22, 1862,” in Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, U.S. Government, 1901, pp.15-16 (link); Homestead Act (link)
