At the conclusion of the Civil War, Congress moved to grant citizenship to African-American men. In ratifying the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, Congress ensured freedom, civil rights, and suffrage for former slaves but failed to anticipate the violent opposition of white Southerners. That opposition led to the passage of three measures, known as the Enforcement Acts, that protected the newly granted rights of African Americans in the South.
The first measure, passed on May 31, 1870, consisted of four parts: It provided considerable penalties for those who interfered with a citizen’s right to vote; it turned cases pertaining to congressional elections over to the jurisdiction of the federal courts; it assured impartial voting by outlawing conspiracies; and it gave President Ulysses S. Grant the power to use American armed forces to assist in protecting civil rights.
The second measure, passed on February 28, 1871, was an amendment to the first. Rather than give the federal courts complete control over congressional elections, this measure authorized federal supervisors to observe and intervene in congressional elections in towns with more than 20,000 inhabitants. In order to prevent these supervisory officers from taking too much control, the second measure also defined their role and specified their powers.
Congress passed the third, and last, measure, also known as the Ku Kiux Klan Act, on April 20, 1871. This measure prohibited terrorist conspiracies, by which Congress meant the new groups of racist vigilantes calling themselves the Ku Kiux Klan. In addition, it gave the president the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus in areas where terrorist conspiracies took place.
The Enforcement Acts proved ineffective, except in breaking the power of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina. Throughout the decade after the passage of the acts, Southern resistance to voting by African-American people only intensified.
By 1876 support for the Enforcement Acts was beginning to fade. Two cases argued before the Supreme Court (United States v. Reese et al. and United States v. Crui-kshank) challenged the constitutionality of aspects of the first enforcement measure. The Court declared that voting rights were best regulated by state power, not federal authority. In addition, the Court claimed that the language of the statutes was too vague. In 1890 Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Maine made one last effort to strengthen the Enforcement Acts. His bill would have bolstered some provisions of the Enforcement Acts, but the Senate rejected the measure. The federal government would not again take an active role in protecting freedmen’s rights in the South until the 1960s.
Further reading: David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Knopf, 1970); William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979).
—Megan Quinn and Fiona Galvin
World History
