 Following the war, Smalls was a delegate to the 1868 South Carolina Constitutional Convention. He was elected to the State House of Representatives, and then to the State Senate, and in 1874 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. But this was a brutal era in U.S. politics, where anti-reconstructionists frequently used violence and intimidation, often through shadow organizations of the Democrats, such as the Ku Klux Klan and the South Carolina Red Shirts.