As the hoopla of the funerals of the eight CSS Hunley crewmen abated last week, the Army, in Gulfport, Miss., quietly christened a supply ship named in honor of another S.C. Civil War naval hero, Robert Smalls. Both he and the Hunley crewmen pulled off feats of nautical bravery - in the Hunley's case, sinking a Union warship with the world's first successful military attack submarine. But the absence of an S.C.-based celebration of Smalls' accomplishments underscores the ambivalence that many South Carolinians still feel about the Civil War.

On May 13, 1862, Smalls, a black slave with a master pilot's knowledge of the waters in and around Charleston harbor, commandeered the Confederate steamer Planter from the Charleston dock. Along with its crew of slaves and their families, Smalls, wearing the captain's uniform, navigated the vessel through heavily mined waters under the guns of Fort Sumter and delivered it into the hands of the U.S. Navy.

In his book "South Carolina: A History," professor Walter Edgar of the University of South Carolina reports that "Smalls supplied the Union forces with valuable information about torpedo fields and the absence of Confederate defenses on the southern end of James and Morris islands."

A hero in the North, Smalls was awarded a military commission and command of the Planter, which proved invaluable in ferrying Union soldiers and supplies through the shallow coastal waters of South Carolina and Georgia. After the war, Smalls settled in Beaufort, became a major general in the S.C. militia and an S.C. legislator, and he served five terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Had Smalls been a white man, his theft of the Planter would be viewed as treason. But as a slave who risked his life to free himself, his family, his crew and his crew's families, Smalls was no less a hero than the brave folks who scaled the Berlin Wall to escape the Iron Curtain. He deserves broader public recognition as a hero in his home state.