United States v. Cruikshank

Impact

The Cruikshank decision marked yet another milepost on the Republican retreat from Reconstruction. With the Democrats in control of the House of Representatives, there would be no chance for Republicans to pass new enforcement legislation. Meanwhile, by the time the decision appeared, the Grant administration was engulfed by charges of corruption involving cabinet members and the White House staff. Although the decision itself did not rule on the constitutionality of the Enforcement Act of 1870, the opinion ensured that its clauses would be construed strictly and narrowly. A second opinion released by the Court on the same day the Cruikshank decision was issued, United States v. Reese, bore more directly upon the Enforcement Act of 1870. In Reese, strictly interpreting the scope and meaning of that legislation, Waite found it insufficient to protect the right outlined in the Fifteenth Amendment, that is, the right to vote as not abridged due to race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The prosecution had charged that Kentucky election officials had violated the law in refusing to allow William Garner, an African American, to vote, but it could not be demonstrated that they did so because of Garner’s race.

By March 1876, only three southern states remained under Republican rule: South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida. Without the threat of federal prosecution, terrorist forces continued to target black voters, tipping the scale toward Democratic candidates. Had southern blacks been allowed to vote freely in the election of 1876, the Republican candidate Rutherford B. Hayes would have then secured the presidency. Instead, the Democratic candidate Samuel J. Tilden claimed a majority of the popular vote, falling just one electoral vote short of the presidency owing to disputed voting returns in the three Republican states still remaining in the South. Through the resulting Compromise of 1877, Hayes was awarded the disputed votes and the presidency in exchange for the promise that federal troops would be removed from the three southern Republican-led states. Grant and then Hayes duly removed the troops from Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, and by the summer of 1877 the southern states were all under Democratic rule. Not until the twentieth century would the federal government once more use force and the law to assure blacks their right to vote.