He applied for a Navy pension in 1883 and the bill was blocked, reportedly because of his race. He got a pension fourteen years later at a rate equivalent to a Navy captain — a recognition of what he had been, filtered through the racial architecture of what the post-Reconstruction federal government was willing to do for a Black veteran.
He watched, at age fifty-six, as the South Carolina constitutional convention wrote the disfranchisement that would undo the work of the 1868 convention he had helped shape. He published his objections in the New York World. The constitution was adopted.
None of this is unfamiliar in the broad strokes to anyone who has studied the trajectory of Black political and civic life in the post-Reconstruction South. What is specific to Smalls is the combination: the extraordinary individual achievement of 1862, the substantial wartime service, the significant postwar political career, and then the systematic removal of nearly everything his career had built, achieved through legal means by people who had decided that the outcome of the Civil War was not going to mean what it had appeared to mean.
He did not leave. He did not give up on the political process, even as it was used against him. He contested elections. He went to the 1895 constitutional convention as a delegate and objected formally and publicly. He used what leverage he had, in 1913, to prevent a lynching. He died in Beaufort, where his mother was buried, in the house where she had been enslaved.