The transition from Union war hero to South Carolina Republican politician was not as clean as it might appear from the outside. Smalls moved into politics in the context of Congressional Reconstruction, which established the conditions under which formerly Confederate states could return to the Union — conditions that included Black male suffrage and the temporary disqualification of former Confederate officials from voting and officeholding. These conditions produced, across the former Confederate states, a period of significant Black political participation: Black men voted in large numbers, Black men served in state legislatures and in Congress, Black men held local offices. The period lasted roughly from 1867 through the late 1870s in most southern states, and somewhat longer in South Carolina because of the relatively large Black majority in that state’s population.
Smalls’s entry into this period was through state politics — helping found the Republican Party in South Carolina, serving as a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention, then serving in the state House and Senate. His move to Congress in 1875 brought him to the national level at a moment when Reconstruction was already under severe strain.
## What Congress Could and Couldn’t Do: 1875 to 1887
The Congresses in which Robert Smalls served were not the Congresses of the Reconstruction’s early ambitious period. By 1875, the political climate in Washington had shifted significantly away from the vigorous enforcement of Reconstruction-era legislation that had characterized the early 1870s.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875, which Smalls supported, was the last significant civil rights legislation the federal government would pass until 1957. It prohibited racial discrimination in public accommodations — hotels, theaters, transportation. It was largely unenforced in the South and was struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1883. The pattern was consistent: federal legislation protecting Black civil and political rights was passed, inadequately enforced, and then judicially or politically dismantled.