USNS, ROBERT SMALLS.

     It is considered by sailors to be bad luck to change a boat's name. Imagine how that superstition may affect a US Navy ship; a guided missile destroyer like the USNS Chancelorsville, ironically named for a battle where the Union army was defeated by Lee's Army of the South. But that is what just happened. The new name of the naval vessel is now the, Robert Smalls. It is named after a former slave who was conscripted to serve on a Confederate steamship during the Civil War. History tells us that he was a skilled navigator serving on a sidewheel steamboat named the CSS PLANTER. Being a navigator is a complex skill combining mathematics and astronomy, we do not know how Mr Smalls achieved that skill, but I will cover later in this missive a possible explanation. The South, even today, does not like to allow the wrong people to be educated, but the Confederate navy needed his skills enough to assign him to a steamship only recently put into service. It is said that the CSS PLANTER, was powered by a sidewheel. And this is where this narrative becomes speculative. 

      I'm a liberal. Which means I don't pretend to know all of the story. I do not, like your run-of-the-mill MAGAt or Q-bot, make grandiose claims with the sureness that there is no other possible way of seeing things. But I know a couple things about this era, and the transition from sailing ships of war to steam-powered vessels. We know about the Monitor and Merimac, which were early experiences in iron-clad warships. They were not at their best navigating on open water. Paddle-steamers were a little farther along in development. Early paddle-wheel steamers were side-wheel steamers. The only pictures I have found so far indicate that the PLANTER had a single side-wheel on the port side. A single sidewheel presented unique handling difficulties, especially in the open ocean. A river has a flow of water going in one direction with little or no rebound wave. Tides ebb and flow but the wave action is uniform.

     In the ocean, the ship has to contend with wave action including rebound waves, as well as tides, but that is only part of the story. Everything that floats must contend with three concomitant forces on the water (or in the air); pitch yaw and roll. Pitch is the up and down movement of a floating object, yaw is the twisting movement of the bow as it meets the water, and roll is the side-to-side movement due to the rounded bottom. In addition to this the bow wave created by forward movement spreads out at the roundness of the bow and comes back amidships. I toured the Seattle museum of flight many years ago and saw an F-102 fighter jet that was designed with pinched side construction, or the coke-bottle shape. The airodynamic effect is similar to the fluid dynamics of a boat through water, it allows that "side-stream" to hit the side of the boat, or plane abaft the bulge, thus providing less drag. I suspect fluid dynamics was not well understood in the mid-19th century, with the possible exception of Clipper ships, but the side-wheel would have been exactly where that wavelet turns into the hull. In addition the sidewheel does not grab the water with the same effectiveness each revolution of the big wheel on account of the wave and current dynamics. So the steam engine that turned the big wheel would labor under different loads as the wheel turned.  If the vessel is steaming directly into the current, or directly downstream, the stresses on the gears driving the wheel might have been somewhat lessened, yet you still have that pitch, yaw, and roll to contend with. Consequently, the torsional pressures on the engine and gears must have been considerable. 

     Many years ago while mis-spending my mid-20s hanging around the Ala Wai harbor in Honolulu, Hawaii I was pleased to have been befriended by some of the crew of a boat readying to sail to Tahiti. I had hoped that I could have joined them but the maritime gods were not favorable. This boat was a 39' Colin Archer, a north seas rescue boat built like a mountain cabin. The main salon, in fact had exposed 4x4 verticle timbers supporting the cabin, and the planks of the hull were thicker than your hand. Not your fingers but the fat part of your hand. It was a plump 10 feet on its beam and did not have a proper keel so it could be used in shallow waters. Her name was HAVORN, with one of those squiggly things over the "O". The harbor denizens had christened her, OOMPAH. She had a one-cylinder engine that was original equipment, dating back to the early years of the 1900's. The cylinder was nearly 3 feet tall, and 10" around. When the engine was running the boat would rock from side-to-side with the travel of the piston in its up-and-down motion. I mention this because the torsional stresses on that paddle-wheel steamer from the mid 1800's must have been similar. Back to the steamer. There was also the problem of docking in port with the sidewheel. Eventually someone decided on the sternwheel, which worked somewhat better, but still suffered the torsional pressures on the gearing. 

     Mr. Smalls, who had established himself as a navigator in the Confederate Navy was probably not serving willingly, the times being what they were. It was not his country. Consequently a time came when he saw an opportunity to take he and his family, plus a few friends to freedom in the north. He stole the CSS Planter, sailed her out of a harbor in South Carolina toward the north where he turned her over to the Union Navy. That vessel remained in use during the Civil War and Robert Smalls, now a commisioned officer, was her Captain. Abraham Lincoln was a brilliant strategist with pretty good strategists in his cabinet. In today's lexicon they would have been called "woke" by the very party he led at the time. He knew that the now 'free' men who had migrated north on the underground railroad would make a potent fighting force in the union army, and would be a dangerous psychological force to the South. When it came to navigation, those free-men had a pretty good knowledge of celestial formations. Children would often recieve patchwork quilts with family history recorded on the blocks that would be known only to them. One of the designs on those quilts was a dipping gourd. When they were fleeing to freedom they were admonished to "follow the dipping gourd". In celestial navigating, the North Star can be found by drawing a line from the lip of the Big Dipper's open pan to the handle of the Little Dipper, to one of the stars in Sirus, the dog constellation. There was even a song that they learned late at night in the cabins to keep the memory fresh. 

     People who presume themselves to be superior to others, by dint of race, creed, or color, lose track of their common sense at some point in their history. Some of us would argue that they start with a lack of common sense, but I, and people like me, are not credited by those people with having common sense. The history of the Underground Railroad, and the flight to freedom in the CSS PLANTER by Robert Smalls are but two of a long history of the arrogance of white supremacy being shown up by those most affected by that imposition of power. A few years prior to the Civil War, there was this war with Mexico during the presidency of  James K. Polk. It should also be mentioned that there was a rump party during this time supporting Polk's aquisition of land between the oceans. They were called the Know-nothings. Some of you might be making a comparison between them and one of our two dominant parties today and ironically, some in that party reminiscent of the know-nothings, is calling for the US to invade Mexico to stop the flow of drugs. Many of the US officers in that war would find themselves, later, on opposite sides in the war between the states. There was a battalion of Irish and German soldiers that became frustrated with their treatment by the American army. The Know-nothing party, who called themselves nativist in spite of not being native were also opposed to immigration. Consequently Irish and German soldiers were the recipient of much derision. So they crossed the Rio Grande and fought for the Mexican army under the named of the St Patricks Brigade, or San Patricios. They were led by a fellow named John Ryan and they were a highly effective fighting unit which became a cannon brigade.

     Just recently the Tennessee legislature, in an excercise of power reminiscent of the "Old South (meaning of course, the South at any time since the arrival of Europeans), tried to exclude two young black representatives from the state legislature for the crime of joining a gun registration protest. There was a white female, somewhat older, that joined them and she too was threatened, but remained a representative by one vote. This, like many examples of white hubris, enraged an entire nation, as well as the people of their respective precincts. Those young men were temporarily re-appointed to their respective seats, subject to a special election to be held at a later date. 

     There are many more examples throughout our history where the unwoke make fools of themselves and end up getting themselves confronted by what we have come to call, a "come to Jesus moment". I have a more colorful description but I will spare you, it refers to stepping on a tiny appendage. There will be others, because stupid people never recognize their own stupidity. It has been so since before we were given that word HUBRIS by the ancient Greeks.