United States v. Cruikshank et al. involved an effort to bring to justice three men accused of participating in the slaughter of some one hundred blacks in Colfax, Louisiana, on April 13, 1873, one of the most sensational incidents of Reconstruction political violence. During Reconstruction, the decade-long period after the Civil War, the federal government passed laws to protect blacks from violence and intimidation as they sought to exercise the right to vote. Nonetheless, in Cruikshank, the Supreme Court affi rmed a lower federal court’s decision to invalidate the result of a previous verdict of guilty and ordered the release of the defendants.