In 1913, Senators Ellison D. Smith and Benjamin Tillman — the latter the son of a political family that had been among the most aggressive forces of Reconstruction’s destruction — objected to his continued service, and he was removed from the customs position. He was seventy-four years old.
## 1913 and What He Said About the Town
The same year that he lost the customs post, Robert Smalls intervened in a situation that could have ended in a lynching.
A Black man in Beaufort was in danger of being taken by a mob. Smalls went to the mayor of Beaufort and said, according to accounts of the incident, that if the mob was not stopped, the town would burn. The mayor and the sheriff moved to stop the mob. The man was not taken.
The episode is not documented with the same level of institutional sourcing as Smalls’s congressional record or his naval career. What it represents, at minimum, is that in his seventies, in a South Carolina that had legally and violently dismantled the political order he had spent his adult life building, Smalls was still intervening, still using whatever standing he had left, still trying to prevent violence against the community he had returned to after his escape in 1862.
He had been trying for fifty years.
## The Last Period and What He Left
Robert Smalls died on February 23, 1915, in Beaufort, South Carolina. He was seventy-five years old. The cause was listed as malaria and diabetes. He is buried in the churchyard of Tabernacle Baptist Church in downtown Beaufort.