Robert Smalls published a newspaper, established a transportation company and served five terms in the United States Congress. Before those laudable accomplishments, though, Smalls had to secure his freedom.
Born into slavery in South Carolina in 1839, Smalls escaped during the Civil War when he commandeered the Planter, a Confederate transport ship, and surrendered to the Union Navy at Charleston Harbor in May 1862. Smalls went on to do great things, but none of them would have been possible if he didn’t risk his life — and the lives of others — by getting himself and his family out of the South.
His incredible story so impressed screenwriter Rob Edwards (“Captain America: Brave New World”) that Edwards wrote “Defiant: The Story of Robert Smalls,” a graphic novel that is scheduled to be released on Thursday, June 19, 2025, which is Juneteenth — the federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery.
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Until about three years ago, Edwards had no inkling who Smalls was.
“I consider myself fairly well-read, and I started researching it,” Edwards told Military.com in a phone interview. “I couldn’t believe all the things that this guy had done, and even worse, I did not know about it.”
Edwards, an Academy Award-nominated screenplay writer for the animated Disney movies “Treasure Planet” and “The Princess and the Frog,” said working on “Defiant” — his first crack at writing a graphic novel — was a wonderful experience. Yet he had to overcome a significant disadvantage, because he knew so little about Smalls’ life.
Edwards read books and consulted two resources who provided invaluable guidance in Myisha Eatmon, a history professor at Harvard, and Michael Boulware Moore, who wrote about his great-great-grandfather’s daring escape from slavery in the 2024 picture book “Freedom on the Sea.”
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Edwards discovered how Smalls, the pilot of the Planter, and the other Black crew members conspired to escape, recognizing what might be their only realistic opportunity when the ship’s three white officers went ashore for the night on May 13, 1862.
Disguising himself as the ship’s captain, Charles Relyea, Edwards took control of the Planter and successfully navigated his way through five Confederate checkpoints in Charleston Harbor. Only then did the Planter’s Black crew remove its Confederate flag, replacing it with a white cloth that Smalls’ wife presciently thought to bring aboard, and surrender to Union forces.
“I have this phrase that I throw around a lot, which is ‘WWRSD: What Would Robert Smalls Do?'” Edwards said. “As you’re having a bad day, you think about it, and you’ve never had as bad a day as Robert Smalls before he turned 23. If he could do what he did, given his upbringing, then anything is possible.”
Before working on “Defiant,” Edwards was hardly alone in his lack of knowledge about Smalls’ struggles and achievements. Stories of other formerly enslaved people who escaped, such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, are well-known, but most Americans know very little about Smalls, which is all the more amazing when considering he helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to allow Blacks to serve in the Union Army.
“At one time, he was the most famous Black person in the world,” Edwards said. “It can’t be just happenstance that we don’t know who he is. It is not a huge leap of conscience to think that there might have been some type of attempt to make sure that this story didn’t get out.”
“Defiant,” which is already in its second printing before its release to the public, is only the first attempt to make Smalls’ story accessible to a wider audience. It is the first of three graphic novels planned by Letter M, a crowd-funded entertainment company that also produced the military comedy-drama “My Dead Friend Zoe.” The second graphic novel will focus on Smalls’ service in the Union Navy after the Planter was confiscated, and the third will be about his time in Congress.
Edwards said he will be involved in those projects, as well as a potential movie about Smalls.
Given the fraught political climate in the U.S. today and the dismantling of diversity programs, including those in the military, Edwards said the release of “Defiant” arrives at an opportune time. More than 160 years after Smalls achieved the seemingly inconceivable, Edwards said, the man’s story remains relevant.
“When you’re in junior high, when you’re in high school, you should learn these stories,” Edwards said. “All of them are not painful. This is not a painful story. This is an inspirational slave narrative, but in our history, there is pain.
“Slavery lasted for 250 years,” he continued. “This country is 250 years old, so you can’t tell the story of America without telling huge chapters of stories like this. At the end of the day, I think a kid — white, Black, whatever — can read this and not feel triggered and instead feel inspired. Hopefully, it opens the door for us to tell more stories like it.”
“Defiant: The Story of Robert Smalls” will be available on Amazon, among other outlets.
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