The election season of 1883 in the South was marked by violence even though it was not a presidential election year. In Danville, Virginia, an armed group attacked Black Republicans who came to vote and killed several of them. On the same day, in Copiah County, Mississippi, a local organizer named J. P. “Print” Matthews was murdered at the polling site by a white supremacist Democrat named Erastus Wheeler. Although a native of Copiah County, Matthews had been a supporter of the Union during the Civil War, and until the day he was killed he worked to enfranchise Black people in the county. These excerpts from the Report of the Select Committee show that the murders that occurred on Election Day in 1883 were preceded and accompanied by violence and threats of violence. These were direct violations of the right to vote enshrined in the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been ratified thirteen years earlier. Because the rights of citizens to vote were being violated, a special commission was established by Congress to investigate the situation. It was these violations of the Constitution, and not the multiple murders, that gave Congress the authority it needed to investigate.