Susan Small

Susan Small was a seventeen-year-old wife and mother when she escaped to freedom with her infant son Philip aboard the Confederate steamer the Planter. In the early hours of May 13, 1862, Susan’s husband John Small and members of the enslaved crew commandeered the ship before silently guiding it past Fort Sumter into the safety of the US Navy blockading Charleston Harbor. As the ship’s engineer, John was responsible for maintaining the ship’s steam engines, a task vital to the success of the mission in which he and pilot Robert Smalls carried a total of sixteen men, women and children out of slavery and into freedom.¹

In August 1862, Congress authorized the distribution of cash prizes for the capture of the Planter. While John Small received $450, Susan, described as “the other women (not mentioned)” received nothing because she and the other married women “derive benefit through their various relationships to the men”. Annie White and Lavinia Wilson, “unprotected women of the party” were awarded $100 each since “these two have no such connection and are destitute and unprovided for.”²

Finding Susan in the historical record and giving agency to her life as a daughter, wife, and mother is difficult, more so because she began her life enslaved. Few records are readily available to the researcher to document her life as an enslaved woman. She does not appear in the historic record until John mentions her in his 1869 Freedom’s Bureau Bank application. Because we first “meet” Susan in the historical record as a married woman, we do not know her maiden name nor the names of her parents and this lack of information makes it difficult to trace her backwards or forwards in time.

It is likely that Susan was from the Charleston area since John was born and raised in Charleston, and they were living there at the time of their escape, but we have no way of knowing that for certain. Susan’s birth year of approximately 1834 comes from later census records but her once cherished birthdate is long forgotten; many enslaved people did not know their actual birthdate or even year of birth, only an approximation.

After Susan escaped enslavement with baby Philip and husband John, the family settled in Beaufort, South Carolina where thousands of formerly enslaved people were taking their first steps as free people. There John worked as an engineer in what was a vibrant and exciting community populated with American soldiers, humanitarian missionaries, and thousands of newly freed people going to school and working for themselves for the first time in their lives.

It is possible that Susan, John and Philip were in the crowd at Camp Saxton celebrating the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Prince Rivers, recently self emancipated, addressed the crowd in an enthusiastic speech after being presented the colors of the First South Carolina Volunteers as the regiment’s first Color Sergeant. Two weeks later, the “First South” proudly marched through Beaufort under the command of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, demonstrating their fitness for service. Perhaps inspired by witnessing formerly enslaved men wearing the uniform of United States soldiers, John Small enlisted in Company C, 34^th United States Colored Infantry Regiment, known as the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers during the war, on March 20, 1863. Serving his country up and down the south Atlantic coast with frequent stays in Beaufort, John mustered out in February 1866 and headed for his wife and children.³

While living in Beaufort, Susan and John added three daughters to their family; Rosa, Ann Amelia and Lucretia, born between 1863 and 1867.⁴ It was during this time that Susan and her children began to be documented with their surname spelled “Smalls” although John signed his name “Small” and at present there is no verifiable familial connection to Robert Smalls of the Planter, who had also settled in Beaufort.

In July 1869, Susan appears for the first time in the historical record under her own name when John completed Freedman’s Bank Application No. 3482. In his application he provided personal information about himself and his family including naming Susan and their three children. Philip, Lucretia, and Rosa are named using the surname Smalls but John proudly signs his application, “John Small”. He also includes their daughter Ann Amelia who has died.

By July 26, 1870, Susan and John had moved back to Charleston where Susan kept house while John worked as a stevedore on the docks. The census enumerator ticked the column “Whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane or idiotic” for Susan but we have no means of knowing what this really meant about Susan’s health. Living with them are 8-year-old Phillip and 2-year-old Lucretia as well as an 11-year-old girl, “El”, described as a domestic servant. Their daughter Rosa, who should be about 7 is not living with them and has not been found in the census for 1870. Interestingly, living next door to them was 38-year-old Annie White who had also on the Planter and may be a relation of Susan or John.⁵

We see Susan again on February 13, 1871, when John completed a second account with the Freedman’s Bank, account number 6504. In doing so, he again helpfully provided historians with a little more information about his life and family. Susan and John were still living in Charleston’s Ward 3 but now we know the address; 25 Wall Street. He worked as a laborer “on the Bay” although we do not know if Susan was working outside the household. Phillip, Rosa and Lucretia are with them, but their deceased sister Anne Amelia was not forgotten and still listed on the application.⁶

It is another nine years before we find Susan again in the 1880 Census. In the summer of 1880, she was still in Charleston’s Ward 3 at 112 Anson Street, just around the corner from the home she shared with her husband John in 1871. But in 1880, Susan was widowed and worked as a laundress, living within a small community of women, some single and others widowed like herself, who supported themselves by taking in laundry. It was demanding physical work, but washing was one of the few opportunities for women in the Nineteenth century. It begs the question of what, if any, physical or mental limitation Susan lived with when considering the 1870 Census. Susan’s 18-year-old son Philip worked “on wharf” but it was not steady work, and he had been unemployed for two months out of the previous year. Daughter Lucretia was 12 and going to school, a dream Susan could never have imagined when she was a little girl living in enslavement.

The 1880 Census is the last time we “see” Susan Small with any certainty. The 1890 US Census was largely destroyed by fire in 1921, and no Susan Small/Smalls appears in the 1900 or 1910 Census. However, on June 2, 1886, a 56-year-old widow named Susan Small died of uterine cancer in her Charleston home at 115 Calhoun Street. The address is a four-minute walk from 112 Anson Street, the home where Susan Small lived in 1880 and a seven-minute walk along Anson Street to the home where Susan last lived with her husband John in 1871. She is very likely the same Susan Small who took control of her life and fled to freedom with her husband and baby son in May 1862.⁷

Resources

1. United States Naval War Records Office, Official records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion. Washington : U.S. G.P.O., 1894, 824-825.

2. There are many contemporary sources available in newspaper archives. See: The New York Herald. (New York, N.Y.), 18 May 1862. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. <https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030313/1862-05-18/ed-1/seq-1/; “A Strike for Freedom” by Alfred Gourdine, Detroit Free Press (Detroit, Michigan), 17 December 1893, p. 30, Newspapers.com Dec 17, 1893, page 30 - Detroit Free Press at Newspapers.comFor books, see: Cate Lineberry, Be Free or Die. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.

3. Exact numbers of the people freed in the Combahee Raid vary according to eyewitness reports but hover around 750. See Edda L. Fields. Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War. London: Oxford University Press, 2024.

4. The National Archives, Washington, DC. Registers of Signatures of Depositors in Branches of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, 1865-1874; Volume: Roll 20: Beaufort, South Carolina; Jun 20, 1868-Jul 3, 1874, Record Group Number: 101; Record Group: Records of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 1863-2006.

5. US Census, 1870, Charleston Ward 3, Charleston, South Carolina. Roll M593, Roll 1386, page 141.

6. The National Archives, Washington, DC; Records of the Field Offices of the Freedmen's Branch, Office of the Adjutant General, 1872-1878; NARA Series Number: M2029; NARA Reel Number: 1; NARA Record Group Number: 105; NARA Record Group Name: Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1861 - 1880; Collection Title: United States Freedmen's Bureau Miscellaneous Records 1865-1872., Roll 1.

7. South Carolina Death Records, 1875-1899, Charleston. Certificate no. 999. Columbia: Carolina Department of Archives and History; Columbia; Kellee Blake, “’First in the Path of the Firemen’; The Fate of the 1890 Population Census”, Genealogy Notes, Spring 1996, Vol. 28, No. 1, “First in the Path of the Firemen” | National Archives