## The Constitutional Convention of 1868 and What It Built
The South Carolina constitutional convention of 1868 is one of the less-examined achievements of the Reconstruction period, and Smalls’s role in it is worth understanding in some detail.
The convention met under the terms of the Reconstruction Acts, which required former Confederate states to draft new constitutions as a condition of re-admission to the Union. The new constitutions had to include provisions for Black male suffrage. South Carolina’s 1868 constitution went considerably further than the minimum requirements in some respects.
The provision for free, compulsory public education was among the most significant. Before the Civil War, South Carolina had no public school system to speak of, and literacy for enslaved people was illegal. The 1868 constitution created the framework for a public school system open to children of all races. This was not merely symbolically significant; it was the creation of an institutional infrastructure that did not exist before.
The convention also established more equitable legal procedures, abolished debtors’ prisons, and reformed property law in ways that had practical benefits for the state’s poor white population as well as its Black population. The constitution was not solely the work of Black delegates — the convention included white Republicans, both native South Carolinians and Northern newcomers — but the Black delegates were the majority, and the provisions that most directly addressed the post-slavery situation of Black South Carolinians reflected their priorities.
Smalls’s specific contributions to the convention are documented in the convention’s proceedings. He spoke on education and on the rights of freedpeople. He was one of the delegates who understood that the constitution was not an end in itself but an instrument — that what mattered was whether the provisions it contained would be implemented and sustained against the political forces that were already organizing to prevent that implementation.