Decided during the Reconstruction Era, the case represented a major defeat for federal efforts to protect the civil rights of African Americans.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Morrison Waite reversed the convictions of the defendants, judging that the plaintiffs had to rely on Louisiana state courts for protection.

The decision left African Americans in the South at the mercy of increasingly hostile state governments dominated by white Democratic legislatures, and allowed groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to continue to use paramilitary force to suppress black voting.

The election results were still undetermined at the beginning of spring, and both Republican and Fusionists had certified their own candidates for the local offices of sheriff and justice of the peace.

The Act had been designed primarily to allow Federal enforcement and prosecution of actions of the Ku Klux Klan and other secret vigilante groups against blacks, both for violence and murder and for preventing them from voting.

This is one of the amendments that has no other effect than to restrict the powers of the national government, leaving the people to look for their protection against any violation by their fellow citizens of the rights it recognizes, to what is called, in The City of New York v. Miln, 11 Pet.

139, the "powers which relate to merely municipal legislation, or what was, perhaps, more properly called internal police," "not surrendered or restrained" by the Constitution of the United States.

[10] As white Democrats regained power in the late 1870s, they struggled to suppress black Republican voting through intimidation and fraud at the polls.

The Cruikshank ruling allowed groups such as the Ku Klux Klan to flourish and continue to use paramilitary force to suppress black voting.

As white Democrats dominated the Southern legislatures, they ignored the violence and refused to allow African Americans any right to bear arms.

Cruikshank has been cited for more than a century by supporters of restrictive state and local gun control laws such as the Sullivan Act.

Cruikshank and Presser v. Illinois, which reaffirmed it in 1886, are the only significant Supreme Court interpretations of the Second Amendment until the ambiguous United States v. Miller in 1939.

[citation needed] The majority opinion of the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller suggested that Cruikshank and the cases flowing from it would no longer be considered good law as a result of the radically changed opinion of the Fourteenth Amendment when that issue eventually comes before the courts: With respect to Cruikshank's continuing validity on incorporation, a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases.