Robert Smalls Research Paper

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Robert Smalls was born on April 5, 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina. Robert Smalls was born to his mother (Lydia Polite) and another man who is not known. Robert Smalls’ father was most likely Henry K. McKee the son of the plantation owner. Robert Smalls may have been a slave, but he was still treated better than other slaves. “What is clear is that the McKee family favored Robert Smalls over the other slave children, so much so that his mother worried he would reach manhood without grasping the horrors of the institution into which he was born.” Lydia was a house servant to the slave owner John K. McKee.

When Robert Smalls was a child he lived in Beaufort, South Carolina. “Robert’s early life was rather easy as compared with that of other enslaved children. He was taken around town by Henry McKee and had opportunities to play with children in the
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Though, Robert eventually became a famous politician who worked in the Senate and the House of Representatives. “His success opened doors in politics, and soon he served as a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention and was elected to both the South Carolina House of Representatives and the State Senate. Between 1874 and 1879, served in the United States House of Representatives, but his tenure was marred by partisan accusations that he took a $5,000 bribe while in the state senate.” In 1856, he married Hannah Jones, a slave hotel maid who worked in Charleston. Jones already had one daughter, and together she and Smalls had a daughter and a son, Robert Jr., who later died of smallpox. Smalls's attempts to buy his wife and family out of slavery failed.Robert Smalls married Hannah Jones until she died in 1883. Then Robert Smalls married Annie Wigg in 1890. Robert Smalls had 4 children: Sarah Smalls, Robert Smalls Jr., William Robert Smalls, and Elizabeth Lydia Smalls Bampfield. They lived in in Beaufort, South Carolina at the time of their