The work of a customs collector in a small port like Beaufort in the 1890s and early 1900s was not glamorous. It was administrative: managing the paperwork of vessels entering and leaving the port, collecting the duties owed, maintaining the federal presence at the local level. For a man who had piloted a Confederate steamer through five armed forts in the dark, who had taken command of a vessel under fire when the captain fled, who had lobbied the Secretary of War and served five terms in Congress, the customs house represented a significant reduction in scope. He held it because it was what was available, and because it was better than having nothing.
The period from 1887 to 1915 — the last twenty-eight years of his life — is sometimes treated as a coda in accounts of Smalls’s career. The big things happened before then, and what came after was decline. This framing understates what he continued to do and what the period meant.
He remained an active presence in Beaufort’s community. He maintained relationships with the national Republican Party, attending conventions and maintaining correspondence. He intervened, in 1913, to stop a potential lynching — using his standing with the mayor, whatever remained of the weight his name carried, to prevent a specific act of violence against a specific person. He was seventy-four years old when he did this. The threat of racial violence in Beaufort in 1913 was not hypothetical; lynching was a documented reality across the South throughout this period. That he used what leverage he had to prevent it, in his seventh decade, in a political environment in which almost every institutional protection he had spent his career building had been dismantled, is part of the record.