SMALLS: The South wanted his head. The North, his heart.

The Confederacy put a $4,000 bounty on his head. Astonished Northerners showered him with adulation. Robert Smalls, the son of a white plantation owner, stunned the nation in 1862 when he commandeered Charleston's most prized warship and sailed it past the deadly guns of Fort Sumter to freedom. The heroic escape, which made him the most famous black man in the United States, also earned Smalls a meeting with Abraham Lincoln that changed the course of the Civil War. While his name may have been erased from some history books, the story of one man's heroic fight to free a race from bondage continues to amaze and inspire all Americans