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

Yearning to Breathe Free weaves together a rich tapestry of the life and times of Robert Smalls. The enslaved Smalls, who took possession of the Confederate warship the Planter while in Charleston harbor in May 1862, safely delivering it to Union blockades shortly afterward, has rightly acquired the status of hero in the history of the Civil War. Yet, this heroic legacy has perhaps overshadowed the wider life story of Smalls, looking backward to slavery and forward to Reconstruction, when Smalls experienced a distinguished (if at times difficult) political career. The full biographical story of Smalls is precisely what Billingsley’s text focuses upon, situating Smalls’s story within a framework of themes: family, religion, and education. These three subjects run throughout the text and in the process reveal how Smalls negotiated his life—from slavery to freedom—and the legacies he left behind for his own family; the community of Beaufort, South Carolina; and the American nation.

The book is divided into five parts, each devoted to a specific period of Smalls’s life. Beginning with his early years, the text documents how he was born into slavery, in Beaufort, South Carolina, on April 5, 1839, to Lydia Smalls, a fifteen-year old “favoured house slave,” who raised him until he was eleven years old (22). Undoubtedly, Lydia’s strong religious convictions and teachings were impressed upon Smalls from an early age. Moreover, the text suggests that in addition to benefiting from the unswerving love of his mother, Smalls looked to his slaveholder, Henry McKee, as a substitute father figure. The argument that McKee attained the role of “Small’s sociological father” is one that Billingsley returns to repeatedly (32). These claims will no doubt cause some consternation among scholars, who will find the assumed closeness of this relationship troubling. In addition, and perhaps more problematic, will be Billingsley’s seeming abnegation of the role of enslaved men in their children’s lives.

The focus of parts 2 and 3 of the text are on Smalls’s seizure of the Planter, his subsequent career in the Union forces for the remainder of the Civil War, and his personal and public life during Reconstruction. What is evident in these two sections are the ways in which his “family of liberation”— immediate, extended, and fictive—sustained Smalls throughout his heroic deed: “The family was an indispensable support system for the motivation, planning, and execution of the seizure of the Planter” (56, 65). The familial networks that Smalls developed throughout his lifetime also provided the incentive required, and preserved his purpose, to strive for racial equality during the era of Reconstruction.

Of particular interest in the last chapters of the text, are Smalls’s actions at the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1895, where he and five other elected black Republicans sought to safeguard black suffrage rights in the state. Their ultimate defeat resulted in the “theft of black rights to vote, in general, for some seventy years” (178). Nevertheless, as Billingsley argues, although “their tangible gains were few,” they did establish a state-supported university for African Americans, a goal which Smalls had sought to achieve for the entirety of his political career (178).

Billingsley crafts a superb genealogical history of Robert Smalls, blending family history with local and state history, while also placing Smalls’s life and career within a wider framework of the national narrative. Billingsley provides a wealth of documentation concerning Smalls’s personal and political life. Furthermore, he succeeds in impressing upon the reader the fundamental role that family networks played in all areas of Smalls’s life. As the book’s closing quotation states, “I stand here today a man, as good as any other man” (225). As Billingsley’s book so expertly demonstrates, without the influences of family Robert Smalls may not have become the man whose legacy lives on in the history of the African...