August 6, 2025 • 34 mins
Enslaved on a plantation in South Carolina, Robert Blake had little chance for freedom. Then came a surprise battle, a bold choice, and a new mission in life: serving in the U.S. Navy. Robert’s heroism would make him the first Black sailor to receive the Medal of Honor. But what happened next is… a total mystery.
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Episode bibliography:
Reidy, Joseph P. “Black Men in Navy Blue During the Civil War.” Navy and Marine, 2001.
https://www.navyandmarine.org/ondeck/1862blackinblue.htm
Jowdy, Laura. “Who Was Robert Blake? The Mystery of a Black Medal of Honor Recipient.” Congressional Medal of Honor Society, March 6, 2025 https://www.cmohs.org/news-events/medal-of-honor-recipient-profile/who-was-robert-blake-the-mystery-of-a-black-medal-of-honor-recipient/.
Frazier, Herb. “Little-known Civil War hero once enslaved on South Santee.” Charleston City Paper, June 2, 2023.
https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2023/06/02/little-known-civil-war-hero-once-enslaved-on-south-santee/.
“Whatever Happened to Robert Blake and the Battle of Legareville, SC.” Civil War Traveler (Blog), January 5, 2024.
https://civilwartraveler.blog/2024/01/05/whatever-happened-to-robert-blake-and-the-battle-of-legareville/
The Frog of History. “The First African American Medal of Honor Recipient is Missing.” YouTube video. June 27, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aYHT8va5uM&t=233s
Quarstein, John V. “Ben Butler and the Contrabands.” The Mariners Museum and Park, May 28, 2021. https://www.marinersmuseum.org/2021/05/ben-butler-and-the-contrabands/
National Archives. “Black Soldiers in the U.S. Military During the Civil War.” National Archives and Records Administration, October 4, 2023.
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/blacks-civil-war#:~:text=The%20black%20troops%2C%20however%2C%20faced,more%20harshly%20than%20white%20captives
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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(00:27):
The link is also in our show notes below.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Pushkin.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
The men of the gunboat USS Marblehead woke up to
the sound of cannon fire. It was blasting across the bow,
splintering the wood of their ship. It was early Christmas morning,
eighteen sixty three. The Marblehead was a Union Navy vessel
(01:05):
patrolling the slow moving Stono River in South Carolina, just
south of Charleston. The ship worked its way past the
tidal marshlands, past rice plantations and tiny towns, scanning for
rebel activity. The men on the ship had no idea
(01:26):
that Confederate forces were hiding waiting. They had secretly placed
guns in.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
The forest near the shore.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Now those guns were pointed right at the Marblehead, firing
their artillery, blowing holes in the ship and the ship's men.
The Union sailors ran up from their cabins below decks,
some of them still in their night shirts. They sprinted
to their battle stations. In their midst was a young
(01:58):
man named Robert Blake. He raced back and forth to
the hold of the ship, bringing boxes of gunpowder to
one of the main guns. The Marblehead's rifles boomed and shook,
sending fire to shore. The rebel forces returned fire. Sailors
fell wounded to.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
The ship's deck. It was a bloody scene.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
More than anyone aboard, Robert knew that they had to
keep the Confederate forces at bay, not just to save
their ship, but because Robert understood something else. If he
was captured, some of those Confederate soldiers might recognize him
an enslaved man who had escaped from a plantation not
(02:47):
that far away, the kind of man those Confederates hated
most of all.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm Jr.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Martinez, and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.
The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in
the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery and combat
at the risk of life, above and beyond the call
of duty.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Each candidate must be approved.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
All the way up the chain of command, from the
supervisory officer in the field to the White House. This
show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant,
and what their stories tell us about the nature of
courage and sacrifice. Today we'll explore the story of Robert Blake,
(03:37):
the first Black sailor to receive the Medal of Honor.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Blake served in.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
A cool and brave manner, according to his commanding officer,
but that doesn't make him an anomaly on that ship
or any other Union vessel. He was one of many
black sailors to serve honorably during the Civil War. They
were forced that helped change the trajectory of the whole conflict,
(04:04):
But they are also a group that we know very
little about.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
At a time that was.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Dangerous for any formally enslaved person in the South, these
black sailors took on even more risk, and they did
it to fight for a country they believe could be better.
Would be better not just for them, but for everyone
who came after. I'm gonna preface this episode by saying
(04:48):
we don't know all that much about Robert Blake, which
means two things. First, there's a little speculation involved, a
bit more than we usually have in an E episode. Second,
it's kind of like a detective story. So we found
a detective. We'll meet him in a bit. Let's start
(05:11):
with what we know for sure. Robert Blake was enslaved
at the Oak Grove plantation in South Carolina. It was
located on the South Santee River, just six or seven
miles from the Atlantic coast.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oak Grove was actually one of three.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Plantations owned by a man named Arthur Middleton Blake. He
came from a long line of plantation owners. His family
had been enslaving people for more than one hundred years.
The name Oak Grove I make it seem like some
idellic setting, but the reality was very different. There were
(05:48):
deadly mosquito born illnesses like malaria and yellow fever, poisonous snakes, alligators.
But if the environment was inhospitable, the work was even
worse because these were rice plantations and cultivating rice was backbreaking,
(06:09):
dangerous work. It was done by hundreds of enslaved people
of African descent, toiling without a break day after brutal day.
And that's where our hero Robert Blake was born, And
to add to the confusion, he wasn't the only Robert
(06:30):
Blake who lived at Oak Grove. Many enslaved people born
there were given the last name Blake. It was a
way to show who their slaveholder was. Our Robert Blake,
the Medal of Honor recipient, was most likely born around
eighteen forty. The fact that he made it through childhood
(06:51):
was a miracle. On rice plantations, more than half of
black children did not survive to age fifteen. Like other
enslaved children, he wouldn't have had any kind of formal education.
Enslaved children were often separated from their parents. Maybe this
(07:11):
was true of Robert. It's impossible to know, but what
is pretty certain is that as soon as he was
able to work, he would have been out in the
rice fields, digging and planting and harvesting from sun up
to sundown. And then, in eighteen sixty one, shots were
(07:35):
fired just forty miles away at Fort Sumter, and the
Civil War began. For Robert and the rest of the
residents of Oak Grove, the world they knew was about
to massively change. For one thing, Arthur Middleton Blake, the
owner of Oak Grove, fled the United States. He left
(07:58):
for England a week after Fort sumterfell in April of
eighteen sixty one. The next key thing that happened. The
Union decided to set up a blockade to keep trade
ships from entering or leaving the Confederate States. This had
two purposes, to prevent the rebels from getting supplies like ammunition,
(08:22):
and to keep them from trade with Europe, cutting off
their source of income. But while the Union wanted to
create a blockade, the Confederates were equally set on breaking it.
Rebel blockade runners would find holes in the Union naval lines,
then they would zip through them in small boats loaded
(08:43):
with goods for waiting European ships. So the Union Navy
set up bases in Confederate territory to stop those blockade runners.
In South Carolina, they went to Port Royal, close to Charleston,
an area that they called the Low Country. It had
a ton of plantations, including Arthur Blake's. Now you have
(09:07):
to imagine that the enslaved people on Blake's plantation knew
something big was up. The war was suddenly so close.
They must have looked at the unionships on the horizon
and thought, is our world about to change.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Do we dare to hope.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Most of the local plantation owners fled to England like
Arthur did, or further inland where it was safer, which
makes you wonder did those owners really think that the
people that enslaved would just stay there, keep tending to
the rice, wait patiently for the war to end, and
(09:49):
they're enslavers to return. Okay, brief history refresher here. There's
something called the Fugitive Slave Act. It meant anyone, even
Union soldiers, were ordered by law to return escaped enslave
people to their owners. And in the earliest days of
(10:10):
the war, Union soldiers in the South followed that law
and returned runaway slaves. But then something sort of incredible happened.
A Union general in Virginia decided, I'm not playing by
that rule anymore. He refused to return three escaped enslave
(10:31):
men to their Confederate slaveholder. He figured that a Virginia
had seceded from the Union, so federal laws like the
Fugitive Slave Act no longer applied, and b just like
anything else the Union army might seize from the enemy,
those escaped slaves were contraband, so there was no point
(10:54):
in slaveholders asking for them back. The Union army would
hang on to them and give them freedom. Thanks word
traveled fast. Soon enslaved people across the South were escaping
and joining Union troops wherever they could find them. This
(11:14):
generated a ton of good press and goodwill in the North.
Pretty soon the whole point of the conflict began to change.
It became a war to free the slaves, which brings
us back to Oak Grove Plantation. By June of eighteen
sixty two, it had become a posting for a regiment
(11:36):
of Confederate soldiers. Since it was on the Santee River,
it was a perfect spot for blockade runners to sneak
their cargo past the Union naval fleet. Naturally, the Navy
wanted to stop this kind of activity, so they had
ships from the base at Port Royal patrolling the coastline
(11:56):
and rivers, and on June twenty fifth.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Three Union ships steam past Oak Grove.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
The Confederate troops were heading but they couldn't help themselves.
They fired on the last ship and the convoy. There
were marines on those Union ships, and you know marines,
they were very happy to get off the boats and
bring the fight to land. As the Union ships returned fire,
(12:24):
a group of sixty marines and sailors got into rowboats
and came ashore. They raced to a Confederate battery, a
gun position in the woods, but when they got there
it had been deserted. The rebels shooters had fled. Then
the Union troops went to the plantation itself. They discovered
(12:45):
a cache of weapons and proof that the spot had
been used by blockade runners, so they burned the house,
the mill, and a reported one hundred thousand bushels of rice.
The enslaved people of Oak Grove watched the fire burn
Arthur Blake's property. They saw the Union men in their
(13:07):
sharp navy blue uniforms, and they realized now is the
time to escape. So four hundred of them, pretty much
everyone enslaved at Oak Grove grab what they could. They
raced to the Union ships, and in their midst was
(13:27):
a young man named Robert Blake. As I mentioned earlier,
we know so little about Robert Blake that we needed
the help of a detective.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
He's Joseph P.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Ready, Professor emeritus at Howard University. He is the expert
on the experiences of black men in the Navy, during
the Civil War. And yet even he thinks Robert Blake
is a mystery. There's so much we don't know.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
We don't know he was married and if she had
any children. I'm what have you.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Here's what we can tell you about Robert Blake. He
stood five feet five and had a dark complexion.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
What we're not so.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Sure about his exact age, but Professor Reidy checked the
records on this.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Now when her shows up on a muster roll, he's
listed as age twenty two. That seems to be the
sensible age that he was.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So Robert, along with hundreds of other enslaved people, left
Oak Grove as the plantation burned. They got on one
of those three Union ships. They were taken to a
refugee camp near the naval base in Port Royal. It
was called North Island. Refugee camps for escaped slaves had
(14:54):
popped up everywhere the Union troops were. They were nicknamed
contraband camps. They were away for communities to stay together,
to take care of one another, raise crops, and get jobs,
paid jobs, probably for the first time ever. Of course,
(15:14):
the contraband camps were still deep in Confederate territory, so
they weren't really safe. In July of eighteen sixty two,
Union commanders learned that five hundred rebels were preparing to
attack North Island quote with the intention of destroying the contrabands,
which number seven hundred men, women and children. But it
(15:40):
was far far better than life on implantation, and it
showed people that the Navy and the Union wasn't just
a way to escape slavery. It was the basis for
a whole new life and a whole new cause.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
It didn't take long to realize that, especially on coast
the or along the river banks, that US naval vessel
potentially were a place of refuge, and that presented an
opportunity for them to say, we will do whatever we
can to help defeat the slaveholder's rebellion.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
In the meantime, the Navy looked at the men in
the contraband camps and thought we would love their help.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
One of the officials and Lincoln's administration realized that African
Americans were fleeing slavery and seeking the refuge upon naval vessel.
They realized here was a source of manpower that they
could put the good use.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So they started recruiting them to join. This wasn't an
entirely surprising turn of events for Starters. The Navy had
long allowed black men to enlist, and they weren't even
segregated like they were in the Army back then. They
couldn't be because of the cramp orders on the ships.
(17:02):
At first, their numbers were small, like five percent, but
as the war heated up, so did enlistments. By the
summer of eighteen sixty two, when we meet Robert, it
was more like fifteen percent. In fact, more than eighteen
thousand black men served in the Union Navy during the
(17:24):
Civil War. Many came from up North and had always
been free. They were allowed to work their way up
the ranks, from boy the lowest to signal quartermaster. But
the newer conscripts, the formerly enslaved ones, were given a
new designation, not boy, but contraband. Unfortunately, these new sailors
(17:50):
were treated as if they were less intelligent and even
less strong. They were weak, the reasoning went, because they'd
been worked almost to death on the plantations. But that
was by no means true. One Union commander said, quote,
they fought energetically, bravely, none more so they felt that
(18:15):
they were working on the deliverance of their own race.
Giving black men the chance to fight for the Union
felt like a path towards civil rights. The famous statesman
Frederick Douglass wrote quote, Let the black man get an
eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulders,
(18:36):
and bullets in his pockets, and there is no power
on earth or under the earth that can deny that
he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.
We've seen this so many times before in this series,
from Mary Walker to Macario Gottacia, people seeing their military
(18:59):
survey as a way to become more fully part of
America with all of its rates, from voting to citizenship
to freedom itself.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
The Union Navy used.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
That pitch as they walked through the Contraband camp in
North Island.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Military and naval recruiters were suggested to the men, you
must wipe for your freedom. That's the way you're going
to secure it. You're going to help the UITs defeat
the Confederacy, and then of course of doing that, you
will free yourselves and you will free your pamia.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
On July third, the Navy asked for sixty volunteers to
go to Port Royal for duty on the USS Vermont.
Robert was one of them. Almost all of the enlisted
men on the Vermont had African ancestry, and they had
originally come from plantations up and down the coast. They
(19:53):
worked as laborers because the Vermont wasn't a warship. It
was a supply station, a warehouse for all the things
as sailor would need, clothing, ammunition, or letters from home.
It was also the entry point for men just joining
the naval service. That's where Robert would have been trained.
(20:15):
It had another benefit to it kept him close to
his community.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
The people who escaped from the Blade plantation with them,
whom he would have considered a family of thought. If
they were nearby when he was stationed on the Vermont,
the possibility of interacting with them could have meant that
he and other men could have maintained that sense of
community even while they were enabled servants.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
And in a world that had been so hard and
so painful, you can imagine how much that community might
mean to Robert. So he worked on the USS Vermont,
most likely as a longshoreman, hauling supplies onto the ship.
Not glamour, of course, but a solid pain job that
(21:04):
only lasted about two months. Then he was assigned to
a gunship, the USS Marblehead. There he would be fighting
for his liberty and his life. Just around daybreak on
(21:37):
December twenty fifth, eighteen sixty three, the sound of cannon
fire burst through the quiet South Carolina morning. Shot after
shot came from shore, catching everyone on the crew by
total surprise. The Captain Richard W. Mei came running up
(21:58):
from his cabin. He was only twenty six, a skinny
guy with big, sad eyes and a wispy handlebar mustache.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Mead was still.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Wearing his night shirt and slippers, gripping his sword in
one hand and his revolver in the other. The Marblehead
was on duty in the Stono River. It was part
of the blockade protecting troops who were working nearby, and
it was completely unprepared for battle. For one thing, the
(22:32):
crew was shorthanded down to seventy men from the usual
one hundred, and the ship was partly disabled. One of
the boilers was being repaired, and the crew had been
getting ready to wash down the deck, so they had
pointed their largest gun inward towards the middle of the ship,
(22:55):
not out towards the enemy. The shots kept coming from shore.
The Confederates had hidden cannons behind some earthworks in the woods.
They had been planning this attack for a while. The
goal was to disable the Marblehead and capture its men,
that included the roughly one hundred and fifty Union troops
(23:18):
stationed nearby. Captain Mead shouted for his men to assume
battle stations, and Robert Blake went to work. He was
a powder man, sometimes called the powder boy. His job
was to carry gunpowder from the powder magazine to the
guns on the deck. The magazine was tucked away and
(23:40):
designed to avoid explosions or fires by keeping the gun
powder safe. So powder men were usually young, small and fast.
They had to be able to squeeze between the tight
spots on the ship where the powder was kept. Mead
ordered the Marblehead to quickly move clars closer to the
(24:00):
shore and to the Confederates. That way, the ship would
be harder to hit. Then he ordered the Marblehead's guns
to be fired. As the sailors got ready, blast kept
coming from shore. Steel and wood fragments splintered across the deck.
(24:22):
In the first fifteen minutes, three Union sailors had been killed,
several more were wounded. Mead later wrote that quote the
decks were slippery with blood. Robert was the powder man
for a twenty pounder rifle. It looked like a cannon,
(24:42):
and it was located at the front of the ship,
out in the open, totally unprotected from enemy fire. He
would have been running back and forth from the powder
magazine to the rifle, up and down, over and over,
exposed to fire every time he reached the deck. Robert
(25:07):
had been on that boat since September. He knew, of course,
that he would face danger, and he was ready.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
It was not yet we're fighting for the freedom of
enslaved South Carolinian or all enslaved people throughout the country. No,
it was literally their family and their homes and people
that they knew and they loved, and they hoped to
spend their reck with their lives.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
With That love and commitment must have been an engine
for his courage. But there was something else sparking that
bravery as well, a knowledge of what waited for him
if they failed, if he was captured. Being a prisoner
during the Civil War was horrific. The death rate of
(25:56):
POW's was as high as thirty percent, but the fate
of men like Robert who were formerly enslaved fighting for
the Union was much much worse. The battle went on,
a sailor was cut into by a round from the
(26:17):
Confederate cannon. The men must have been screaming, screaming orders,
screaming from the pain, but according to later reports, Robert
kept us cool.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
He was fulfilling years at Zion duty under extremely stressful
and dangerous circumstances, and he was able to keep doing
it at a rather extraordinary pace throughout the engagement.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Years later, me described quote the excellent manner in which
he served his gun, his coolness, intrepidity, and high spirits,
and the merry laugh with which he cheered his comrades
under this severe and galling fire of the enemy.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
He seemed wholly insensible to fear.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
He would cut jokes with his comrades as he passed
along to the magazine with his box under his arm.
He showed a marked degree of intelligence and forethought. During
the hottest part of the fight. The battle went on
for an hour and a half. Robert's gun fired seventy
two times, a super high number when you consider how
(27:30):
much work it took to fire a gun back then.
But his energy didn't flag, and by eight am the
skirmish was over. The men of the Marblehead were victorious.
Three days after the battle, Mead went ashore with his
men and took the rebels guns. It was the first
(27:51):
Union naval victory in more than two years, and Robert
would get the credit he deserved. Need was determined that
Robert would be honored for his brave actions of Christmas
Day eighteen sixty three. First, he ensured that Robert got
a promotion to seamen, leaving his contraband label behind him
(28:15):
for good. And Robert, along with three other sailors, received
the Medal of Honor. The Order for the Metal reads quote,
Robert Blake, serving as powder boy, displayed extraordinary courage, alacrity,
and intelligent in the discharge of his duties under trying circumstances,
(28:38):
and merited the admiration of all. Robert Blake would be
the first Black sailor to receive the Medal of Honor.
Robert re enlisted. He was on the USS Vermont, where
he had started the war, at least through the summer
of eighteen sixty four, and then well, our trail goes cold.
(29:06):
Robert Blake just vanishes. One possibility is that he stayed
in South Carolina. So many formally enslaved people did after
the war. That was the place they knew, filled with
the people they loved, and record keeping back then wasn't great,
(29:26):
particularly for black folks. But maybe Robert didn't stay in
South Carolina. Our detective Professor Reedy points out that by
now Robert was a seasoned sailor.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
He had naval experienced at that point, and this is
not the say he stayed in the navy, because he
apparently did not, But he could have continued to work
at the Mariner.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
According to a report that Captain Meade wrote decades after
the battle, Robert got one hundred dollars along with his medal.
That's worth more than two thousand dollars today. That's enough
money to kick start a new life. He was still
serving on the Vermont in the summer of eighteen sixty four,
(30:15):
and the Vermont left Port Royal for the Brooklyn Navy
Yard on August two of that year. Could he have
still been on it heading to New York. We just
don't know, but I think it's an amazing idea. At
that time, there were close to a million people living
(30:37):
in New York City. He could have slipped into those
crowded streets. Or Robert could have just boarded the next
boat off to points unknown, skimming across the ocean.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Who knows.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
We have no records of him. It's possible that he
changed his name and left Blake, the name of his
former slaveholder behind. And if you're wondering what happened to
Old Arthur Middleton Blake, here's this gem. For years after
the Civil War ended, Arthur had the audacity to petition
(31:17):
the government asking to be paid back for the slaves
who had been quote unquote taken from him, a sum
that he said amounted to at least four hundred thousand dollars.
One man on Arthur's list of property is named Robert.
He's valued at eleven hundred dollars, almost twice the average
(31:41):
of other enslaved people. Whether that was our Robert Blake
or the other Robert Blake is unclear. In eighteen seventy five,
the US Congress unequivocally rejected Arthur's petition.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Good God Arthur.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Captain Mead also wondered what became of Robber, As he
later wrote, quote whatever became of him? Does not appear,
as there is no record of him in the books
at the Navy Department. But if he is still alive,
he is doubtless as cheery as ever. No man ever
deserved a medal of Honor more truly than this gallant
(32:25):
young negro from the Captain down. Every man on the
marblehead honored the ex slave Robert Blake. I personally love
the idea of Robert having a totally fresh start, a
new city, maybe even a new name. But whether he
(32:46):
left the South or not, I hope he felt that
his courage was rewarded not by the medal of Honor,
not by the one hundred dollars, but by the hope
for a country that might liver on its promise of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Hope for a.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
New version of America, Hope a long last for freedom.
(33:44):
Medal of Honor Stories of Courage is written by Meredith
Robins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane. Our
editor on this episode is Amy Gaines McQuaid. Sound design
and additional music by Jake Gorsky. Our executive producer is
Gonstanza Gotta. Though fact checking by Arthur Gomperts and original
music by Eric Phillips. Production support by Suzanne Gamber Special
(34:08):
thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Don't forget
We want to hear from you. Send us your personal
story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery. Email us
at Medal of Honor at Pushkin dot fm. You might
hear your stories on future episodes of Metal of Honor,
or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.
(34:33):
I'm your host, JR.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Martinez
Hey everyone, We've put together a survey for listeners of
Medal of Honor and we want to hear from you.
Tell us what you love about the show, what we
can improve on, or stories you think we've missed. We're
committed to making this show even better and you can
help to take the survey. Visit bit dot lee slash
MH survey. That's bit dot l y slash MH survey.
(00:27):
The link is also in our show notes below.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Pushkin.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
The men of the gunboat USS Marblehead woke up to
the sound of cannon fire. It was blasting across the bow,
splintering the wood of their ship. It was early Christmas morning,
eighteen sixty three. The Marblehead was a Union Navy vessel
(01:05):
patrolling the slow moving Stono River in South Carolina, just
south of Charleston. The ship worked its way past the
tidal marshlands, past rice plantations and tiny towns, scanning for
rebel activity. The men on the ship had no idea
(01:26):
that Confederate forces were hiding waiting. They had secretly placed
guns in.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
The forest near the shore.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
Now those guns were pointed right at the Marblehead, firing
their artillery, blowing holes in the ship and the ship's men.
The Union sailors ran up from their cabins below decks,
some of them still in their night shirts. They sprinted
to their battle stations. In their midst was a young
(01:58):
man named Robert Blake. He raced back and forth to
the hold of the ship, bringing boxes of gunpowder to
one of the main guns. The Marblehead's rifles boomed and shook,
sending fire to shore. The rebel forces returned fire. Sailors
fell wounded to.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
The ship's deck. It was a bloody scene.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
More than anyone aboard, Robert knew that they had to
keep the Confederate forces at bay, not just to save
their ship, but because Robert understood something else. If he
was captured, some of those Confederate soldiers might recognize him
an enslaved man who had escaped from a plantation not
(02:47):
that far away, the kind of man those Confederates hated
most of all.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm Jr.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
Martinez, and this is Medal of Honor Stories of Courage.
The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in
the United States, awarded for gallantry and bravery and combat
at the risk of life, above and beyond the call
of duty.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Each candidate must be approved.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
All the way up the chain of command, from the
supervisory officer in the field to the White House. This
show is about those heroes, what they did, what it meant,
and what their stories tell us about the nature of
courage and sacrifice. Today we'll explore the story of Robert Blake,
(03:37):
the first Black sailor to receive the Medal of Honor.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Blake served in.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
A cool and brave manner, according to his commanding officer,
but that doesn't make him an anomaly on that ship
or any other Union vessel. He was one of many
black sailors to serve honorably during the Civil War. They
were forced that helped change the trajectory of the whole conflict,
(04:04):
But they are also a group that we know very
little about.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
At a time that was.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
Dangerous for any formally enslaved person in the South, these
black sailors took on even more risk, and they did
it to fight for a country they believe could be better.
Would be better not just for them, but for everyone
who came after. I'm gonna preface this episode by saying
(04:48):
we don't know all that much about Robert Blake, which
means two things. First, there's a little speculation involved, a
bit more than we usually have in an E episode. Second,
it's kind of like a detective story. So we found
a detective. We'll meet him in a bit. Let's start
(05:11):
with what we know for sure. Robert Blake was enslaved
at the Oak Grove plantation in South Carolina. It was
located on the South Santee River, just six or seven
miles from the Atlantic coast.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Oak Grove was actually one of three.
Speaker 1 (05:26):
Plantations owned by a man named Arthur Middleton Blake. He
came from a long line of plantation owners. His family
had been enslaving people for more than one hundred years.
The name Oak Grove I make it seem like some
idellic setting, but the reality was very different. There were
(05:48):
deadly mosquito born illnesses like malaria and yellow fever, poisonous snakes, alligators.
But if the environment was inhospitable, the work was even
worse because these were rice plantations and cultivating rice was backbreaking,
(06:09):
dangerous work. It was done by hundreds of enslaved people
of African descent, toiling without a break day after brutal day.
And that's where our hero Robert Blake was born, And
to add to the confusion, he wasn't the only Robert
(06:30):
Blake who lived at Oak Grove. Many enslaved people born
there were given the last name Blake. It was a
way to show who their slaveholder was. Our Robert Blake,
the Medal of Honor recipient, was most likely born around
eighteen forty. The fact that he made it through childhood
(06:51):
was a miracle. On rice plantations, more than half of
black children did not survive to age fifteen. Like other
enslaved children, he wouldn't have had any kind of formal education.
Enslaved children were often separated from their parents. Maybe this
(07:11):
was true of Robert. It's impossible to know, but what
is pretty certain is that as soon as he was
able to work, he would have been out in the
rice fields, digging and planting and harvesting from sun up
to sundown. And then, in eighteen sixty one, shots were
(07:35):
fired just forty miles away at Fort Sumter, and the
Civil War began. For Robert and the rest of the
residents of Oak Grove, the world they knew was about
to massively change. For one thing, Arthur Middleton Blake, the
owner of Oak Grove, fled the United States. He left
(07:58):
for England a week after Fort sumterfell in April of
eighteen sixty one. The next key thing that happened. The
Union decided to set up a blockade to keep trade
ships from entering or leaving the Confederate States. This had
two purposes, to prevent the rebels from getting supplies like ammunition,
(08:22):
and to keep them from trade with Europe, cutting off
their source of income. But while the Union wanted to
create a blockade, the Confederates were equally set on breaking it.
Rebel blockade runners would find holes in the Union naval lines,
then they would zip through them in small boats loaded
(08:43):
with goods for waiting European ships. So the Union Navy
set up bases in Confederate territory to stop those blockade runners.
In South Carolina, they went to Port Royal, close to Charleston,
an area that they called the Low Country. It had
a ton of plantations, including Arthur Blake's. Now you have
(09:07):
to imagine that the enslaved people on Blake's plantation knew
something big was up. The war was suddenly so close.
They must have looked at the unionships on the horizon
and thought, is our world about to change.
Speaker 2 (09:24):
Do we dare to hope.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Most of the local plantation owners fled to England like
Arthur did, or further inland where it was safer, which
makes you wonder did those owners really think that the
people that enslaved would just stay there, keep tending to
the rice, wait patiently for the war to end, and
(09:49):
they're enslavers to return. Okay, brief history refresher here. There's
something called the Fugitive Slave Act. It meant anyone, even
Union soldiers, were ordered by law to return escaped enslave
people to their owners. And in the earliest days of
(10:10):
the war, Union soldiers in the South followed that law
and returned runaway slaves. But then something sort of incredible happened.
A Union general in Virginia decided, I'm not playing by
that rule anymore. He refused to return three escaped enslave
(10:31):
men to their Confederate slaveholder. He figured that a Virginia
had seceded from the Union, so federal laws like the
Fugitive Slave Act no longer applied, and b just like
anything else the Union army might seize from the enemy,
those escaped slaves were contraband, so there was no point
(10:54):
in slaveholders asking for them back. The Union army would
hang on to them and give them freedom. Thanks word
traveled fast. Soon enslaved people across the South were escaping
and joining Union troops wherever they could find them. This
(11:14):
generated a ton of good press and goodwill in the North.
Pretty soon the whole point of the conflict began to change.
It became a war to free the slaves, which brings
us back to Oak Grove Plantation. By June of eighteen
sixty two, it had become a posting for a regiment
(11:36):
of Confederate soldiers. Since it was on the Santee River,
it was a perfect spot for blockade runners to sneak
their cargo past the Union naval fleet. Naturally, the Navy
wanted to stop this kind of activity, so they had
ships from the base at Port Royal patrolling the coastline
(11:56):
and rivers, and on June twenty fifth.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
Three Union ships steam past Oak Grove.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
The Confederate troops were heading but they couldn't help themselves.
They fired on the last ship and the convoy. There
were marines on those Union ships, and you know marines,
they were very happy to get off the boats and
bring the fight to land. As the Union ships returned fire,
(12:24):
a group of sixty marines and sailors got into rowboats
and came ashore. They raced to a Confederate battery, a
gun position in the woods, but when they got there
it had been deserted. The rebels shooters had fled. Then
the Union troops went to the plantation itself. They discovered
(12:45):
a cache of weapons and proof that the spot had
been used by blockade runners, so they burned the house,
the mill, and a reported one hundred thousand bushels of rice.
The enslaved people of Oak Grove watched the fire burn
Arthur Blake's property. They saw the Union men in their
(13:07):
sharp navy blue uniforms, and they realized now is the
time to escape. So four hundred of them, pretty much
everyone enslaved at Oak Grove grab what they could. They
raced to the Union ships, and in their midst was
(13:27):
a young man named Robert Blake. As I mentioned earlier,
we know so little about Robert Blake that we needed
the help of a detective.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
He's Joseph P.
Speaker 1 (13:49):
Ready, Professor emeritus at Howard University. He is the expert
on the experiences of black men in the Navy, during
the Civil War. And yet even he thinks Robert Blake
is a mystery. There's so much we don't know.
Speaker 3 (14:06):
We don't know he was married and if she had
any children. I'm what have you.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
Here's what we can tell you about Robert Blake. He
stood five feet five and had a dark complexion.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
What we're not so.
Speaker 1 (14:19):
Sure about his exact age, but Professor Reidy checked the
records on this.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Now when her shows up on a muster roll, he's
listed as age twenty two. That seems to be the
sensible age that he was.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
So Robert, along with hundreds of other enslaved people, left
Oak Grove as the plantation burned. They got on one
of those three Union ships. They were taken to a
refugee camp near the naval base in Port Royal. It
was called North Island. Refugee camps for escaped slaves had
(14:54):
popped up everywhere the Union troops were. They were nicknamed
contraband camps. They were away for communities to stay together,
to take care of one another, raise crops, and get jobs,
paid jobs, probably for the first time ever. Of course,
(15:14):
the contraband camps were still deep in Confederate territory, so
they weren't really safe. In July of eighteen sixty two,
Union commanders learned that five hundred rebels were preparing to
attack North Island quote with the intention of destroying the contrabands,
which number seven hundred men, women and children. But it
(15:40):
was far far better than life on implantation, and it
showed people that the Navy and the Union wasn't just
a way to escape slavery. It was the basis for
a whole new life and a whole new cause.
Speaker 3 (15:55):
It didn't take long to realize that, especially on coast
the or along the river banks, that US naval vessel
potentially were a place of refuge, and that presented an
opportunity for them to say, we will do whatever we
can to help defeat the slaveholder's rebellion.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
In the meantime, the Navy looked at the men in
the contraband camps and thought we would love their help.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
One of the officials and Lincoln's administration realized that African
Americans were fleeing slavery and seeking the refuge upon naval vessel.
They realized here was a source of manpower that they
could put the good use.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So they started recruiting them to join. This wasn't an
entirely surprising turn of events for Starters. The Navy had
long allowed black men to enlist, and they weren't even
segregated like they were in the Army back then. They
couldn't be because of the cramp orders on the ships.
(17:02):
At first, their numbers were small, like five percent, but
as the war heated up, so did enlistments. By the
summer of eighteen sixty two, when we meet Robert, it
was more like fifteen percent. In fact, more than eighteen
thousand black men served in the Union Navy during the
(17:24):
Civil War. Many came from up North and had always
been free. They were allowed to work their way up
the ranks, from boy the lowest to signal quartermaster. But
the newer conscripts, the formerly enslaved ones, were given a
new designation, not boy, but contraband. Unfortunately, these new sailors
(17:50):
were treated as if they were less intelligent and even
less strong. They were weak, the reasoning went, because they'd
been worked almost to death on the plantations. But that
was by no means true. One Union commander said, quote,
they fought energetically, bravely, none more so they felt that
(18:15):
they were working on the deliverance of their own race.
Giving black men the chance to fight for the Union
felt like a path towards civil rights. The famous statesman
Frederick Douglass wrote quote, Let the black man get an
eagle on his button and a musket on his shoulders,
(18:36):
and bullets in his pockets, and there is no power
on earth or under the earth that can deny that
he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.
We've seen this so many times before in this series,
from Mary Walker to Macario Gottacia, people seeing their military
(18:59):
survey as a way to become more fully part of
America with all of its rates, from voting to citizenship
to freedom itself.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
The Union Navy used.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
That pitch as they walked through the Contraband camp in
North Island.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Military and naval recruiters were suggested to the men, you
must wipe for your freedom. That's the way you're going
to secure it. You're going to help the UITs defeat
the Confederacy, and then of course of doing that, you
will free yourselves and you will free your pamia.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
On July third, the Navy asked for sixty volunteers to
go to Port Royal for duty on the USS Vermont.
Robert was one of them. Almost all of the enlisted
men on the Vermont had African ancestry, and they had
originally come from plantations up and down the coast. They
(19:53):
worked as laborers because the Vermont wasn't a warship. It
was a supply station, a warehouse for all the things
as sailor would need, clothing, ammunition, or letters from home.
It was also the entry point for men just joining
the naval service. That's where Robert would have been trained.
(20:15):
It had another benefit to it kept him close to
his community.
Speaker 3 (20:21):
The people who escaped from the Blade plantation with them,
whom he would have considered a family of thought. If
they were nearby when he was stationed on the Vermont,
the possibility of interacting with them could have meant that
he and other men could have maintained that sense of
community even while they were enabled servants.
Speaker 1 (20:42):
And in a world that had been so hard and
so painful, you can imagine how much that community might
mean to Robert. So he worked on the USS Vermont,
most likely as a longshoreman, hauling supplies onto the ship.
Not glamour, of course, but a solid pain job that
(21:04):
only lasted about two months. Then he was assigned to
a gunship, the USS Marblehead. There he would be fighting
for his liberty and his life. Just around daybreak on
(21:37):
December twenty fifth, eighteen sixty three, the sound of cannon
fire burst through the quiet South Carolina morning. Shot after
shot came from shore, catching everyone on the crew by
total surprise. The Captain Richard W. Mei came running up
(21:58):
from his cabin. He was only twenty six, a skinny
guy with big, sad eyes and a wispy handlebar mustache.
Speaker 2 (22:08):
Mead was still.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Wearing his night shirt and slippers, gripping his sword in
one hand and his revolver in the other. The Marblehead
was on duty in the Stono River. It was part
of the blockade protecting troops who were working nearby, and
it was completely unprepared for battle. For one thing, the
(22:32):
crew was shorthanded down to seventy men from the usual
one hundred, and the ship was partly disabled. One of
the boilers was being repaired, and the crew had been
getting ready to wash down the deck, so they had
pointed their largest gun inward towards the middle of the ship,
(22:55):
not out towards the enemy. The shots kept coming from shore.
The Confederates had hidden cannons behind some earthworks in the woods.
They had been planning this attack for a while. The
goal was to disable the Marblehead and capture its men,
that included the roughly one hundred and fifty Union troops
(23:18):
stationed nearby. Captain Mead shouted for his men to assume
battle stations, and Robert Blake went to work. He was
a powder man, sometimes called the powder boy. His job
was to carry gunpowder from the powder magazine to the
guns on the deck. The magazine was tucked away and
(23:40):
designed to avoid explosions or fires by keeping the gun
powder safe. So powder men were usually young, small and fast.
They had to be able to squeeze between the tight
spots on the ship where the powder was kept. Mead
ordered the Marblehead to quickly move clars closer to the
(24:00):
shore and to the Confederates. That way, the ship would
be harder to hit. Then he ordered the Marblehead's guns
to be fired. As the sailors got ready, blast kept
coming from shore. Steel and wood fragments splintered across the deck.
(24:22):
In the first fifteen minutes, three Union sailors had been killed,
several more were wounded. Mead later wrote that quote the
decks were slippery with blood. Robert was the powder man
for a twenty pounder rifle. It looked like a cannon,
(24:42):
and it was located at the front of the ship,
out in the open, totally unprotected from enemy fire. He
would have been running back and forth from the powder
magazine to the rifle, up and down, over and over,
exposed to fire every time he reached the deck. Robert
(25:07):
had been on that boat since September. He knew, of course,
that he would face danger, and he was ready.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
It was not yet we're fighting for the freedom of
enslaved South Carolinian or all enslaved people throughout the country. No,
it was literally their family and their homes and people
that they knew and they loved, and they hoped to
spend their reck with their lives.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
With That love and commitment must have been an engine
for his courage. But there was something else sparking that
bravery as well, a knowledge of what waited for him
if they failed, if he was captured. Being a prisoner
during the Civil War was horrific. The death rate of
(25:56):
POW's was as high as thirty percent, but the fate
of men like Robert who were formerly enslaved fighting for
the Union was much much worse. The battle went on,
a sailor was cut into by a round from the
(26:17):
Confederate cannon. The men must have been screaming, screaming orders,
screaming from the pain, but according to later reports, Robert
kept us cool.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
He was fulfilling years at Zion duty under extremely stressful
and dangerous circumstances, and he was able to keep doing
it at a rather extraordinary pace throughout the engagement.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Years later, me described quote the excellent manner in which
he served his gun, his coolness, intrepidity, and high spirits,
and the merry laugh with which he cheered his comrades
under this severe and galling fire of the enemy.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
He seemed wholly insensible to fear.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
He would cut jokes with his comrades as he passed
along to the magazine with his box under his arm.
He showed a marked degree of intelligence and forethought. During
the hottest part of the fight. The battle went on
for an hour and a half. Robert's gun fired seventy
two times, a super high number when you consider how
(27:30):
much work it took to fire a gun back then.
But his energy didn't flag, and by eight am the
skirmish was over. The men of the Marblehead were victorious.
Three days after the battle, Mead went ashore with his
men and took the rebels guns. It was the first
(27:51):
Union naval victory in more than two years, and Robert
would get the credit he deserved. Need was determined that
Robert would be honored for his brave actions of Christmas
Day eighteen sixty three. First, he ensured that Robert got
a promotion to seamen, leaving his contraband label behind him
(28:15):
for good. And Robert, along with three other sailors, received
the Medal of Honor. The Order for the Metal reads quote,
Robert Blake, serving as powder boy, displayed extraordinary courage, alacrity,
and intelligent in the discharge of his duties under trying circumstances,
(28:38):
and merited the admiration of all. Robert Blake would be
the first Black sailor to receive the Medal of Honor.
Robert re enlisted. He was on the USS Vermont, where
he had started the war, at least through the summer
of eighteen sixty four, and then well, our trail goes cold.
(29:06):
Robert Blake just vanishes. One possibility is that he stayed
in South Carolina. So many formally enslaved people did after
the war. That was the place they knew, filled with
the people they loved, and record keeping back then wasn't great,
(29:26):
particularly for black folks. But maybe Robert didn't stay in
South Carolina. Our detective Professor Reedy points out that by
now Robert was a seasoned sailor.
Speaker 3 (29:41):
He had naval experienced at that point, and this is
not the say he stayed in the navy, because he
apparently did not, But he could have continued to work
at the Mariner.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
According to a report that Captain Meade wrote decades after
the battle, Robert got one hundred dollars along with his medal.
That's worth more than two thousand dollars today. That's enough
money to kick start a new life. He was still
serving on the Vermont in the summer of eighteen sixty four,
(30:15):
and the Vermont left Port Royal for the Brooklyn Navy
Yard on August two of that year. Could he have
still been on it heading to New York. We just
don't know, but I think it's an amazing idea. At
that time, there were close to a million people living
(30:37):
in New York City. He could have slipped into those
crowded streets. Or Robert could have just boarded the next
boat off to points unknown, skimming across the ocean.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Who knows.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
We have no records of him. It's possible that he
changed his name and left Blake, the name of his
former slaveholder behind. And if you're wondering what happened to
Old Arthur Middleton Blake, here's this gem. For years after
the Civil War ended, Arthur had the audacity to petition
(31:17):
the government asking to be paid back for the slaves
who had been quote unquote taken from him, a sum
that he said amounted to at least four hundred thousand dollars.
One man on Arthur's list of property is named Robert.
He's valued at eleven hundred dollars, almost twice the average
(31:41):
of other enslaved people. Whether that was our Robert Blake
or the other Robert Blake is unclear. In eighteen seventy five,
the US Congress unequivocally rejected Arthur's petition.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Good God Arthur.
Speaker 1 (32:01):
Captain Mead also wondered what became of Robber, As he
later wrote, quote whatever became of him? Does not appear,
as there is no record of him in the books
at the Navy Department. But if he is still alive,
he is doubtless as cheery as ever. No man ever
deserved a medal of Honor more truly than this gallant
(32:25):
young negro from the Captain down. Every man on the
marblehead honored the ex slave Robert Blake. I personally love
the idea of Robert having a totally fresh start, a
new city, maybe even a new name. But whether he
(32:46):
left the South or not, I hope he felt that
his courage was rewarded not by the medal of Honor,
not by the one hundred dollars, but by the hope
for a country that might liver on its promise of life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness for everyone.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Hope for a.
Speaker 1 (33:09):
New version of America, Hope a long last for freedom.
(33:44):
Medal of Honor Stories of Courage is written by Meredith
Robins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane. Our
editor on this episode is Amy Gaines McQuaid. Sound design
and additional music by Jake Gorsky. Our executive producer is
Gonstanza Gotta. Though fact checking by Arthur Gomperts and original
music by Eric Phillips. Production support by Suzanne Gamber Special
(34:08):
thanks to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. Don't forget
We want to hear from you. Send us your personal
story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery. Email us
at Medal of Honor at Pushkin dot fm. You might
hear your stories on future episodes of Metal of Honor,
or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.
(34:33):
I'm your host, JR.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Martinez
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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