United States v. Cruikshank was an 1875 Supreme Court decision that reversed the federal convictions of white militia members who took part in the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana. Chief Justice Morrison Waite, writing for the Court, held that the Bill of Rights restricts only the federal government and that the Fourteenth Amendment reaches only misconduct by state governments, not violence by private citizens. The practical effect was to strip federal prosecutors of the tools they had been using to protect Black citizens from organized racial terror during Reconstruction.
The Colfax Massacre and the Federal Charges
In April 1873, following a disputed gubernatorial election in Louisiana, a white militia attacked Black Republicans defending the Colfax courthouse in Grant Parish. Estimates place the death toll at roughly 100 to 150 Black men, many of them killed after surrendering. Three white attackers died. It was among the deadliest single acts of racial violence during Reconstruction.
Federal prosecutors charged several militia members under Section 6 of the Enforcement Act of 1870, a statute Congress passed to protect the voting and civil rights of newly freed Black citizens.1GovInfo. 16 Stat. 140 – An Act to Enforce the Right of Citizens of the United States to Vote The indictments accused the defendants of conspiring to intimidate citizens and prevent them from freely exercising their constitutional rights.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) A jury convicted three defendants. The Circuit Court then arrested the judgment, finding the indictments legally defective, and the Supreme Court affirmed that decision and ordered the defendants released.
Why the Court Threw Out the Convictions
The Court found the indictments fatally vague. Federal criminal charges must specify which federally protected right the defendants allegedly violated, and the charges here used sweeping language about depriving citizens of their rights generally without identifying any particular right that fell under federal jurisdiction.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) That distinction mattered because the Court drew a sharp line between rights of national citizenship and rights of state citizenship. Only interference with the former could support a federal prosecution.
The Court then walked through each constitutional provision the government invoked and explained why none of them saved the indictments.
The First and Second Amendment Holdings
On peaceable assembly, the Court held that the right existed long before the Constitution was written. The First Amendment did not create it; the amendment simply barred Congress from interfering with it. Because the First Amendment restricts only the federal government, it offered no basis for prosecuting private citizens who broke up someone else’s gathering.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) The one narrow exception was that assembly could qualify as an attribute of national citizenship when the purpose was to petition the federal government or address matters connected to federal powers. Any other gathering fell outside federal protection.
The Court applied the same reasoning to the Second Amendment. The right to bear arms, it said, is not granted by the Constitution and does not depend on the Constitution for its existence. The Second Amendment means only that Congress cannot infringe on that right and has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the federal government.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) A conspiracy by civilians to disarm other civilians was therefore not a federal offense. Protection of the right to keep arms against private interference was a matter for state law alone.
The Fourteenth Amendment and the State Action Doctrine
The most consequential part of the opinion involved the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court ruled that the amendment prohibits states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without due process and from denying equal protection, but that it adds nothing to the rights of one citizen against another.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) The amendment guarantees protection against encroachment by state governments. It does not reach private conduct, however violent or discriminatory.
This reasoning became the foundation of what lawyers call the state action doctrine: the principle that the Fourteenth Amendment limits only governmental entities, not private parties. For the federal government to act under this amendment, there must be some connection to state authority. A state acts through its legislature, its executive, or its courts, and anyone exercising state power who deprives someone of constitutional rights is considered to act in the name of the state.3Constitution Annotated. State Action Doctrine Private citizens acting on their own, even an armed mob carrying out a massacre, fell outside that definition.
The Court left open the possibility that if a state itself denied equal protection, the federal government might have grounds to act against the state. But the federal government could not perform local police duties by prosecuting private citizens for violence that state authorities refused to address.
What Cruikshank Meant for Reconstruction
With federal prosecutors unable to reach private conspiracies against Black citizens, paramilitary organizations across the South operated with increasing boldness. Groups like the White League in Louisiana and the Red Shirts in the Carolinas functioned openly as armed enforcers of the Democratic Party, using intimidation and force to suppress Black voting and overturn Republican governments. They worked in the open because they had far less reason to fear federal prosecution than the earlier, secretive Ku Klux Klan.
State after state saw white political majorities reclaim control and pass poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and other measures designed to strip Black citizens of the vote. The narrow view of the Reconstruction Amendments that Cruikshank established gave these efforts constitutional cover. If the Fourteenth Amendment only prohibited state discrimination and the federal government could not police private violence, then the practical work of disenfranchisement could be carried out by private terror while state governments looked the other way.
Eight years later, in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Supreme Court reinforced this framework by striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment authorizes Congress to pass only corrective legislation aimed at state-level violations, not laws directly governing private discrimination.4Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883)
What Survives Today
Much of Cruikshank has been overturned. The holding that the Bill of Rights limits only the federal government is largely defunct. Over the twentieth century, the Supreme Court adopted the incorporation doctrine, using the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to apply most Bill of Rights protections against state governments.5Constitution Annotated. Overview of Incorporation of the Bill of Rights In 1937, DeJonge v. Oregon held that the rights of free speech and peaceable assembly are safeguarded against state interference by the Fourteenth Amendment, directly contradicting Cruikshank’s claim that assembly was solely a matter for state law.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. DeJonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353 (1937) In 2010, McDonald v. City of Chicago held that the Second Amendment right recognized in District of Columbia v. Heller is fully applicable to the states, treating Cruikshank’s Second Amendment reasoning as outdated.7Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010)
What does survive is the core of the state action doctrine. The Fourteenth Amendment still requires some link to governmental conduct before its protections apply. Congress found workarounds. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 grounded its ban on private discrimination in the Commerce Clause rather than the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestepping the state action limitation entirely.3Constitution Annotated. State Action Doctrine The Enforcement Act provision at the heart of Cruikshank also evolved. Its modern descendant, 18 U.S.C. Section 241, makes it a federal crime for two or more people to conspire to interfere with someone’s free exercise of a right secured by the Constitution or federal law, with penalties reaching up to ten years in prison, or life imprisonment if the conspiracy results in death.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 241 – Conspiracy Against Rights
Cruikshank did not disappear from American law so much as force Congress and later courts to build around it. The state action requirement it established remains a real limitation on federal power. The narrow view of individual rights that made the decision so devastating during Reconstruction has been replaced, amendment by amendment, by the incorporation doctrine that now binds every level of government to most of the Bill of Rights.