In 1890, he was appointed by President Benjamin Harrison as collector of the Port of Beaufort, a position he held until 1913 except during Democrat Grover Cleveland's second term. Smalls was active into the twentieth century. He was "the leading colored delegate" to the 1895 South Carolina constitutional convention. Together with five other black politicians, he strongly opposed the dominant Democratic white delegates as they implacably wrote disfranchisement of the state's black citizens into the proposed constitution. Seeking to publicize this blatantly discriminatory exercise of raw, racist power, they wrote an article for the "New York World". Outnumbered as they were, their valiant opposition came to naught, and the new constitution was adopted, as were similar state constitutions across the South. For many decades, these documents survived legal challenges that reached the US Supreme Court, resulting in both the exclusion of African Americans from political participation and the crippling of the Republican Party throughout the region.