Robert Small was an enslaved man living in Charleston who escaped with his family and a number of other men,  piloting the steamer Planter out of Charleston harbor to join the Union forces. See Edward A. Johnson, A School History of the Negro Race in America, from 1619 to 1890, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, An excerpt from The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Monday, Nov. 24.