A new article in the Smithsonian Magazine offers some insights into Robert Smalls from his teacher in South Carolina. In 1862, Smalls, and enslaved pilot, commandeered the Confederate ship The Planter and took her into Union lines. His act of bravery attracted national attention. Smalls went North to try to convince Lincoln to accept Black men into the Union Army. After his trip, Smalls returned to South Carolina and he, and his four year old daughter , began learning how to read. Harriet Buss was his teacher.
Buss was from Sterling, Massachusetts. Jonathan White, who wrote the article, said she never married. According to Buss, she remained single because “I don’t want to obey one of creation’s lords. Never could I be told to go or stay, do this or that, and surely never could I ask. I submit to no human being as my master or dictator.” Jonathan White says that until now, Buss’s writing on Smalls has never been used by his biographers.
Smalls told Buss his views on Southern women as supporters of the Confederacy. Buss wrote an account of their conversation to her parents:
Robert thinks these Southern women are worse than the men. He says if he had his way, he wouldn’t leave one of them alive to tell the tale; he says too that one of the greatest reasons of their being so opposed to having the colored people free [is] they are afraid the colored men will marry their daughters, but he thinks if the colored men were all like him, there wouldn’t be much danger. The Southern women would never get married if they waited for such as he.
Smalls told her that he never wanted to see a live Southern white woman again!
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
