He sat as a delegate at the 1895 constitutional convention and watched a new constitution be written around him that was explicitly designed to undo everything the 1868 convention had been designed to accomplish. He published his objections in a national newspaper. The constitution was adopted.
He spent the next eighteen years as Collector of the Port of Beaufort, with an interruption, and then was removed from that position at the demand of senators whose political tradition had been the organized enemy of everything he had tried to build.
The historical record does not give us Smalls’s private reflections on what this trajectory meant to him. His public statements were consistently focused outward — on what the community needed, on what the law required, on what could still be done. The 1895 statement about wanting an equal chance in the battle of life was not a lament; it was a restatement of what he had always been asking for, at a moment when the legal architecture was being redesigned to prevent it.
What the pattern of his life suggests is not bitterness but persistence — a quality that is easier to appreciate in retrospect than it probably was to maintain in the lived experience of watching legal protections be dismantled one by one over decades. He kept going. He used whatever lever was available. He insisted, in public forums and in private actions like the 1913 intervention, that the people around him mattered and that their safety and their dignity were worth fighting for.