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Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families

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Description

On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls (1839-1915) commandeered a Confederate warship, the Planter, from Charleston harbor and piloted the vessel to cheering seamen of the Union blockade, thus securing his place in the annals of Civil War heroics. Slave, pilot, businessman, statesman, U.S. congressman–Smalls played many roles en route to becoming an American icon, but none of his accomplishments used to be a solo effort. Sociologist Andrew Billingsley offers the first biography of Smalls to assess the influence of his families–black and white, past and present–on his life and enduring legend. In so doing, Billingsley creates a compelling mosaic of evolving black-white social relations in the American South as exemplified by this famous figure and his descendants.
Born a slave in Beaufort, South Carolina, Robert Smalls used to be raised with his master’s circle of relatives and grew up amid an peculiar balance of privilege and bondage which instilled in him an understanding of and desire for freedom, culminating in his daring bid for freedom in 1862. Smalls served with distinction in the Union forces on the helm of the Planter and, after the war, he returned to Beaufort to shop for the house of his former masters–a house that remained on the center of the Smalls circle of relatives for a century. A founder of the South Carolina Republican Party, Smalls used to be elected to the state house of representatives, the state senate, and five times to america Congress. Right through the trials and triumphs of his military and public service, he used to be surrounded by growing circle of relatives of supporters. Billingsley illustrates how this make stronger system, coupled with Smalls’s dogged resilience, empowered him for success.
Writing of subsequent generations of the Smalls circle of relatives, Billingsley delineates the evolving patterns of opportunity, challenge, and change which were the hallmarks of the African American experience thanks to the selfless investments in freedom and circle of relatives made by Robert Smalls of South Carolina.

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