The Steamer Etiwan, built in the 1830s looked very much like the Planter (above)
Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams Jr., the Etiwan, and Robert Smalls
Old newspapers sometimes open unexpected doors. A brief 1851 reference in the Charleston Mercury to “Dr. Sams” traveling aboard the steamer Etiwan seems minor at first glance. Yet that small notice links three very different stories: a Sea Island planter-physician, a working harbor steamer, and one of the Civil War’s most daring acts.
In the early 1850s, five ‘Dr. Sams’ lived in the Beaufort area. However, given that Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams, Jr., the resident physician and a prominent resident of St. Helenaville with plantations on both St. Helena and nearby Polawana Island, is the most likely candidate, it is highly probable that the ‘Dr. Sams’ in this article was Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams, Jr. (1810–1888).
The Planter’s Shuttle
Built in Charleston in the 1830s, the sidewheel steamer Etiwan served as a dependable shuttle between Charleston and the Sea Islands—Edisto, Rockville, St. Helenaville, and Bluffton. She carried cotton bales, trunks, mail, planter families, and the enslaved crews who powered her engines and handled her lines.
Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams Jr. fit squarely into that world. A resident physician at St. Helenaville and a planter whose family roots reached Polawana, St. Helena, and the Datha Islands—his father, Lewis Reeve Sams Sr., had owned a plantation at Datha Point—he moved comfortably between the plantation and the city. By 1860, his holdings—three plantations, enslaved workers, and livestock—were valued at more than $6 million in today’s dollars, a prosperity that vanished when the Union Navy arrived at Port Royal. A routine trip aboard the Etiwan would have been unremarkable in 1851. For men like Sams, the steamboat network was infrastructure—ordinary, dependable, and woven into the rhythms of Sea Island life.
That world collapsed overnight on November 7, 1861, when Union naval forces seized Port Royal Sound. Sams and his family fled Polawana Island so suddenly that, by one contemporary account, they left silver on the dinner table and their meal untouched—never to return.
A Harbor Moment That Echoed
At dawn on May 13, 1862, Etiwan lay moored at North Atlantic Wharf. That night, Robert Smalls—enslaved pilot of the Confederate transport Planter—executed his escape.
Smalls’s wife, children, and the families of other crew members could not safely board at Southern Wharf. They needed a discreet staging point. For a brief, quiet interval, Etiwan became that place.
Hidden below decks, the families waited. An enslaved seaman from Etiwan, later identified as Chisolm, helped guide them through harbor routines he knew well. When Planter edged alongside, the transfer was swift and silent. Then Smalls turned downstream, passed the Confederate forts, and delivered the ship, cargo, and families to the Union fleet.
The Planter also carried Confederate signal codebooks and the ship’s own artillery—intelligence and armament that Union commanders put to immediate use.
Etiwan did not sail that night. She did not break the blockade. But without her presence—her deck space, her crew, her concealment—the escape may not have succeeded.
Loose Coupling, Stark Contrast
There is no evidence that Dr. Sams ever knew Robert Smalls, although they were both born in Beaufort, South Carolina. Their lives moved in parallel worlds. Yet both relied on the same maritime system—the same harbor routes, the same small steamers, the same skilled Black labor that made movement possible.
In the 1850s, Etiwan carried a physician of the planter class within an orderly slave society. A decade later, that same vessel—through its crew and location—briefly enabled enslaved people to rupture that order from within.
The connection is indirect. It is structural rather than personal. But it is revealing.
An Ending in Familiar Waters
Etiwan’s own story ended in Charleston Harbor when she struck a submerged “torpedo”—a Confederate mine—and was declared a wreck. The channels she knew best destroyed her.
Dr. Lewis Reeve Sams, Jr., lived to see emancipation undo the plantation world that had sustained his class. In 1866, he moved nearly his entire family to Galveston, Texas, the longtime home of his sister-in-law. He died on March 29, 1888, in Williamson County, Texas—some 1,400 miles from the Sea Islands, where he had built his life.
Robert Smalls (1839–1915) went on to become a U.S. Congressman and a national symbol of wartime courage. In one of the war’s most striking reversals, Smalls purchased the Beaufort house where his enslaved mother had once worked and lived there until his death.
Between them sits a modest side-wheel steamer—never famous, rarely mentioned—yet briefly essential to one of the Civil War’s most consequential escapes.
Sources
Harper’s Weekly, June 14, 1862, p. 372
Charleston Mercury, Jan 16, 1851
Charleston Mercury, Feb 19, 1852