United States v. Cruikshank was an 1876 Supreme Court decision that stripped the federal government of the power to prosecute private racial violence, arising from the Colfax Massacre of 1873 in which a white mob killed roughly 150 Black men 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 state action, not the conduct of private citizens. The convictions of the mob members were reversed, no one was punished for the massacre, and the ruling left Black citizens in the Reconstruction South legally dependent on the same state governments that were unwilling to protect them.
The Colfax Massacre
On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, more than 300 armed white men attacked the Grant Parish courthouse in Colfax, Louisiana. About 60 Black men were inside defending the building and the authority of Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg, whose disputed election the previous November was contested by white Democrats backing John McEnery. The attackers aimed a cannon at the building and set it on fire. Some defenders fled; others surrendered. The mob shot many of the unarmed men after they had already laid down their weapons or as they tried to escape. An estimated 150 Black men were killed. Three white men died.1National Archives. Colfax Riot
Local prosecution was not a realistic option. Louisiana’s government was in political chaos, and white-supremacist Democrats controlled much of the local legal machinery. Federal authorities stepped in instead. A U.S. attorney indicted more than 100 members of the mob, though only eight defendants ultimately went to trial in June 1874.2Justia. United States v. Cruikshank
The Federal Charges
The indictment ran to 32 counts brought under Section 6 of the Enforcement Act of 1870. Congress had passed that law to give the federal government power to protect the civil rights of newly freed Black citizens against organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.3govinfo. 16 Stat. 140 – An Act to Enforce the Right of Citizens of the United States to Vote Section 6 made it a felony for two or more people to conspire to prevent any citizen from freely exercising a right guaranteed by the Constitution or federal law.4Wikisource. Enforcement Act of 1870
Prosecutors framed the massacre as a federal conspiracy to deprive Black citizens of constitutional rights, including the right to bear arms, the right to peaceably assemble, and rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Some defendants were convicted at trial. They appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s Ruling
The Court reversed the convictions. Chief Justice Waite’s opinion built on a framework the Court had begun laying three years earlier in the Slaughter-House Cases, which had narrowed the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause.5Congress.gov. Privileges or Immunities of Citizens and the Slaughter-House Cases
Two principles drove the decision. First, the Constitution does not create most individual rights; it prevents the federal government from violating them. Second, because the Bill of Rights limits only the national government, violations committed by private citizens are not federal offenses. Private violence was a matter for state and local law enforcement. Federal authorities could only step in when a state government itself was responsible for the violation.
The Court also found the indictment fatally vague. The charges failed to allege that the violence was racially motivated, which the Court said was necessary to bring the case under federal jurisdiction. Without that allegation, the indictment described ordinary crimes belonging in state court. The defendants walked free. No state prosecution ever followed.2Justia. United States v. Cruikshank
The Second Amendment Holding
Several counts charged the defendants with conspiring to disarm the Black citizens at the courthouse. The Court dismissed them. The right to bear arms, Waite wrote, predated the Constitution. The Second Amendment did not create that right but merely prohibited Congress from interfering with it. The amendment “has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the National Government.”2Justia. United States v. Cruikshank
Because the Second Amendment applied only to federal action, it could not support prosecution of private citizens who forcibly disarmed other private citizens. States were also free to restrict firearms without violating the Second Amendment. That holding stood for well over a century.
The First Amendment Holding
The indictment also charged the defendants with violating the Black citizens’ right to peaceably assemble. The Court drew a sharp line. The right to assemble to petition the federal government was a right of national citizenship that the federal government could protect. The general right to gather for other purposes was not protected by the First Amendment against interference by private parties or state governments.2Justia. United States v. Cruikshank
A group of Black citizens gathering to defend a courthouse during a state political dispute did not qualify as a federal assembly. Protection had to come from the state.
The Fourteenth Amendment and the State Action Doctrine
The most far-reaching part of the ruling involved the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held that the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses restrict only government conduct. The amendment “adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another” and merely prevents states from denying rights through official action.2Justia. United States v. Cruikshank The Colfax defendants were private citizens, not government agents, so their actions fell outside the amendment entirely.
This principle became known as the state action doctrine. The Court hardened it further in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on the ground that Congress lacked authority under the Fourteenth Amendment to prohibit racial discrimination by private businesses. The majority wrote that the amendment was “prohibitory upon the States only.”6Justia. Civil Rights Cases Together, the two decisions left the federal government essentially powerless against private racial violence, however organized.
The Impact on Reconstruction
The timing could not have been worse. Democrats had already won a House majority in 1874 and moved to cut funding for the Enforcement Acts. The combination of defunding and judicial gutting left the Reconstruction-era civil rights framework in ruins.
Without the threat of federal prosecution, white paramilitary groups operated with near-total impunity across the South. The contested presidential election of 1876 produced the Compromise of 1877, which withdrew the remaining federal troops from the former Confederacy. Reconstruction was over.
What followed was decades of organized racial terror, voter suppression, and the construction of Jim Crow. Because Cruikshank placed responsibility for protecting citizens from private violence on state governments, and because those state governments had no interest in protecting Black citizens, the ruling created a legal vacuum that persisted well into the twentieth century. Federal authorities could not prosecute lynchings, could not punish Klan violence, and could not enforce equal rights unless a state government was directly responsible for the violation.
How Later Cases Undid Cruikshank
The central holding, that the Bill of Rights restricts only the federal government, has been almost entirely reversed through selective incorporation. Beginning in the early twentieth century, the Supreme Court started ruling that specific protections in the Bill of Rights are so fundamental to liberty that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause makes them binding on state governments as well.7Legal Information Institute. Incorporation Doctrine
The First Amendment holding fell first. In DeJonge v. Oregon (1937), the Court held that the right of peaceable assembly is a fundamental right protected against state interference by the Fourteenth Amendment. The majority quoted Cruikshank for the proposition that the right to assemble for public affairs is essential to republican government, then used the Fourteenth Amendment to extend that protection to the states, the very step Cruikshank had refused to take.8Justia. DeJonge v. Oregon
The Second Amendment holding took far longer to overturn. In McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), the Court held that the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is “fully applicable to the States” through the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The majority acknowledged that Cruikshank had ruled otherwise but explained the earlier case was decided before the Court developed its modern approach to selective incorporation, describing that reasoning as “defunct.”9Justia. McDonald v. City of Chicago
The state action doctrine itself remains largely intact. The Fourteenth Amendment still applies primarily to government conduct, not private behavior. What changed is the federal government’s toolkit for addressing private racial violence. The modern descendant of the Enforcement Act’s conspiracy provision survives as 18 U.S.C. § 241, which makes it a federal crime for two or more people to conspire to deprive anyone of their constitutional rights. Penalties reach ten years in prison, and if someone dies as a result of the conspiracy, up to life imprisonment or the death penalty.10Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 241 – Conspiracy Against Rights Federal prosecutors now use that statute in cases that would have been impossible under Cruikshank‘s reasoning.
Why the Case Still Matters
Cruikshank is one of those cases where the legal reasoning was technically coherent and the real-world consequences were catastrophic. Telling Black citizens in the Reconstruction South to look to their state governments for protection meant directing them to the very institutions controlled by the people attacking them. The massacre at Colfax went entirely unpunished, and the framework the decision created ensured similar atrocities would go unpunished for decades.
The case also shows how constitutional interpretation can shift over time. Nearly every substantive holding in Cruikshank has been reversed or superseded. The Bill of Rights now applies to the states. Federal civil rights statutes now reach private conspiracies to violate constitutional rights. The narrow reading of the Fourteenth Amendment the Waite Court adopted has given way to a much broader understanding of federal power to protect individual liberty. Those corrections took more than a century, and the damage done in the interim remains one of the most consequential failures of the American legal system.