## The Work of Education and Community
In the immediate postwar period, Smalls invested the recognition he had earned and the resources he had accumulated into the community around him.
He spent nine months systematically learning to read and write — building on what he had begun in Philadelphia during the war. He purchased a two-story building in Beaufort and established a school for African American children, hiring a teacher to run it. This was not simply philanthropy; it was a recognition that literacy was the tool that enslavement had most deliberately withheld, and that making it available to children was one of the most direct responses to what the system had taken.
In 1866, he opened a store in Beaufort with Philadelphia businessman Richard Howell Gleaves, serving the community of freedmen and freedwomen who were now trying to build economic lives on the Sea Islands. The store was part of a broader pattern of economic institution-building by Black residents of the region who understood that political freedom without economic foundation was fragile.
He helped found the South Carolina Republican Party in 1867. The party in that context was the party of Lincoln, the party that had prosecuted the war against secession, and the party that was attempting to build a new political order in the South that included African American citizenship. He was a delegate to the state’s constitutional convention in 1868, where he worked for provisions establishing free, compulsory public education for children of all races. Public education for Black children had been illegal in South Carolina before the war; making it a constitutional right was a fundamental change in the legal architecture of the state.