On September 4, 1875, a political rally and debate at the former Moss Hill plantation near downtown Clinton turned violent when a confrontation between White Democrats and Black Republicans led to an exchange of gunfire that left seven people dead and dozens injured. The gathering had drawn hundreds of Republican horsemen and as many as 2,500 African Americans, along with a smaller number of Whites, including a group of White Democrats from Raymond intent on disrupting the Republican speaker. After Judge Amos Johnston spoke without incident, Captain Hiram Fisher was heckled, a Black constable named Louis Hargreaves followed the men involved, and a dispute over whiskey escalated until, according to eyewitnesses, Frank Thompson of Raymond fired the first shot. Hargreaves was the first killed, followed by another Black constable, Alex Wilson, two Black children, and three White men: Martin Sivley, Frank Thompson, and Charles N. Chilton. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, White vigilantes, militias, and night-riders poured into Clinton, prepared death lists, hunted down African Americans, and killed dozens more, while hundreds fled to Jackson seeking protection from Governor Adelbert Ames and the federal garrison. Ames appealed to President Grant for troops to restore order and protect the November election, but Grant denied use of the Army, and African Americans were threatened with violence and loss of sharecropper contracts while ballot boxes from predominantly Republican precincts were discarded. The suppression of the Republican vote restored Democrats to power in Mississippi, effectively ending Reconstruction in the state and beginning the Jim Crow era. Senator Charles Caldwell, who had helped organize the rally and tried to calm the violence, was later appointed to lead a Black militia transporting arms and was assassinated in Clinton on December 30, 1875. The failure of a peace commission that included Ames and James Z. George was followed by Democratic re-empowerment, Ames's resignation in March 1876, and George's later role in shaping the 1890 Mississippi Constitution that codified segregation and disfranchisement.
