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Yearning to Breathe Free - Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families (Hardcover)
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Yearning to Breathe Free - Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families (Hardcover)
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List price R482
Loot Price R369
Discovery Miles 3 690
You Save R113 (23%)
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On May 13, 1862, the enslaved African American Robert Smalls
(1839-1915) commandeered a Confederate warship, the Planter, from
Charleston harbor and piloted the vessel to 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. 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. Born a slave in Beaufort, South
Carolina, Robert Smalls was raised with his master's family and
grew up amid an odd balance of privilege and bondage. Billingsley
underscores the influence of the slaveholders' household as well as
Smalls' biological family on the development of the passions and
abilities that led Smalls to his bid for freedom in 1862. Smalls
served with distinction in the Union forces at the helm of the
Planter. After the war he returned to Beaufort and bought the home
of his former masters. A founder of the South Carolina Republican
Party, Smalls was elected as a delegate to the black majority 1868
Constitutional Convention as well as to the overwhelmingly white
Constitutional Convention of 1895. Between those two events, he was
elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, the state
senate, and five times to the U.S. Congress. Billingsley
illustrates how Smalls' support system, coupled with his dogged
resilience, empowered him for political success. Today three
branches of the Smalls family remain: the descendants of his
daughter with first wife, Hannah; of Hannah's two daughters from a
previous marriage whom Smalls adopted; and of his son with his
second wife, Annie. Writing of subsequent generations of Smalls'
family, Billingsley delineates the evolving patterns of
opportunity, challenge, and change that have been the hallmarks of
the African American experience thanks in no small part to the
investments in freedom and family made by Robert Smalls of South
Carolina.
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