Smalls’s 1895 statement at the constitutional convention — that all he was asking for was an equal chance in the battle of life — was made in the context of a convention that was specifically designed to ensure that the battle of life would not be equal. The literacy tests and poll taxes that the 1895 constitution imposed were understood by everyone who designed them to be aimed at eliminating Black voting. The disfranchisement was effective and was intended to be permanent.
His publication of his objections in the New York World — a national newspaper with a substantial readership — was an act of appeal to a national audience that he understood the South Carolina constitutional convention would ignore. He was right that the convention would ignore it. He published the objections anyway. The record of his dissent exists because he insisted on making it, in a forum where it would be preserved, even when he had no institutional mechanism to make it effective.
## The Collector of the Port
The appointment as Collector of the Port of Beaufort in 1890 was a federal patronage position — the kind of appointment that the Republican Party used to maintain relationships with significant figures in states where the party could no longer compete in state elections. The customs collectorship was a federal job, insulated from the state-level Democratic consolidation that had ended Smalls’s ability to hold elected office in South Carolina.
It was not nothing. The position gave him a salary, a formal role, and a degree of standing in the community that the end of his congressional service had reduced. He held it from 1890 until 1913, with the interruption of Grover Cleveland’s second term — Cleveland was a Democrat, and the patronage appointments shifted accordingly — before Senators Smith and Tillman had him removed.