His final congressional term ended in March 1887. He was forty-seven years old. He had been a public figure — in the press, in the legislature, in Congress — for twenty-five years. He had seventeen years left to live.
## The Violence That Background the Career
Any account of Robert Smalls’s political career that does not address the systematic violence used against Black political participation in South Carolina is incomplete.
The rifle clubs and Red Shirt organizations that operated across South Carolina in the 1870s were not peripheral to Democratic Party politics in the state — they were central to it. The Hamburg Massacre of July 1876, in which a Black militia company was attacked by a white rifle club and five Black militiamen were killed, several of them after they had surrendered, was the most prominent single episode in a campaign of violence that was explicitly coordinated to suppress Black Republican voting.
Smalls was the major general of the South Carolina State Militia’s Second Division. This was not a ceremonial appointment. The militia was the organized form of Black self-defense in the state, and it was targeted by the rifle clubs precisely because it represented an organized capacity for resistance. The militia companies were outgunned and out-organized by the paramilitary groups that the Democratic Party deployed. The federal government’s eventual decision to remove the military protection that had been enabling the militia and the Republican state government to function was not a neutral act; it was a decision to allow the paramilitary campaign to succeed.