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Charleston demonstrated that the newfangled boats could be defeated by shore defenses and that the city could withstand an attack from the sea.
    Later that year, Smalls was caught in another bloody scrape in the mouth of the Stono River at Folly Island Creek, this time piloting the
Planter.
Whenever Union vessels crept into the watery interior of coastal South Carolina, they risked a loss of maneuverability and the threat of taking close bombardment or sniper fire from shore. The Confederates, trapping Smalls's ship in a narrow part of the river and recognizing it as a stolen prize, resolved to recapture or destroy it, hemming the
Planter
in with an artillery crossfire that shredded the upper part of the wooden boat. When the captain, in the heat of battle, ordered Smalls to ground the vessel and surrender, Smalls emphatically declined. "Not by a damned sight will I beach this boat for you!" he shouted, warning that as far as the rebels were concerned, he and the crewmen were all runaway slaves, and that "No quarter will be shown us!" At that point, according to a later congressional report, "Captain Nickerson became demoralized, and left the pilot-house and secured himself in the coal-bunker." Smalls took control, somehow managing to steer the
Planter
out of range of the Southern guns. Nickerson was dishonorably discharged for his performance, and Smalls, cited for his coolness and bravery under fire, was made the boat's captain.
    In the spring of 1864 he was ordered to sail the
Planter
to a shipyard in Philadelphia for repairs; when the work on the boat stretched from weeks into months, Smalls made himself at home in the northern city. Charlotte Forten, a black Philadelphian working as a teacher in the Sea Islands, had written letters of introduction for him to the city's substantial abolitionist community. Smalls busied himself by monitoring work on the
Planter
and raising money to assist the freedmen at Port Royal.
    One day in December, Smalls and a black acquaintance were walking back to town from the shipyard when, to escape a sudden downpour, they boarded an empty streetcar. A few minutes later two white men got on, and the conductor told the blacks to leave their seats and go stand on the car's rear platform. Smalls refused. When the conductor insisted, he and his companion got off the car. Smalls was inclined to forget the incident, but the local press learned of it and denounced the fact that "a war hero who had run a rebel vessel out of Charleston and given it to
the Union fleet ... was recently put out of a Thirteenth Street car." Broadsides went up, and a committee of Quakers announced a boycott of the streetcars, vowing to no longer allow a practice by which decent "colored men, women, and children are refused admittance to the cars," while "the worst class of whites may ride." At a spirited mass meeting, concerned Philadelphians were addressed by local luminaries including financier Jay Cooke and locomotive manufacturer Matthias W. Baldwin. In the face of such aroused sentiment, the city's streetcar lines capitulated, the protest helping to inspire the state legislature to ultimately ban discrimination in public transportation throughout Pennsylvania.
    That same year Smalls went to Baltimore to join a delegation of black South Carolinians at the Republican National Convention. The group was neither seated nor recognized by the chair, but they made history by formally petitioning the party to include black enfranchisement in its platform. At the time, with emancipation itself a recent development, the request by Smalls and his colleagues for the vote was not likely to get a hearing, even if their presence had been formally acknowledged; however, it was said that the black delegation from the secessionist state of South Carolina was the convention's chief curiosity.
    At war's end, Smalls had a place of prominence at the April 14, 1865, celebration in Charleston, marking the anniversary of the firing on Fort