Smalls remained in Congress through 1887, serving through a period when the practical capacity to represent his constituents was diminishing in every direction. The federal courts were increasingly interpreting the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments narrowly. The Northern Republicans who had been the party’s Reconstruction wing were shifting their attention to industrial and economic policy. The southern wing of the Democratic Party was consolidating white-supremacist governance with increasing legislative sophistication.
In 1895, the state of South Carolina convened a constitutional convention specifically designed to eliminate Black political participation. Smalls was one of six Black delegates. He and the others opposed the literacy tests and poll taxes that the convention was designed to establish. They published their objections in the New York World. The new constitution was adopted anyway, and its disfranchisement provisions were effective: the number of Black registered voters in South Carolina collapsed from the tens of thousands to the hundreds within years. Smalls refused to sign the new constitution.
He was fifty-six years old when that convention met. He had been in South Carolina politics for more than a quarter century. He had been a state legislator, a militia general, a five-term congressman, and a public figure of national recognition since 1862. He watched a constitution designed to make all of that irrelevant be adopted by a vote he could not stop.
President Benjamin Harrison appointed him Collector of the Port of Beaufort in 1890, a federal customs position that Smalls held until 1913, with an interruption during Grover Cleveland’s second Democratic term. The position was not equivalent to what he had held in Congress. It was a federal appointment, stable and relatively insulated from the state-level Democratic consolidation. He held it because he had relationships and standing in the national Republican Party that the state-level Redeemers could not entirely eliminate.