This horrific event functioned as the beginning of the end of Reconstruction in the state. The Clinton Massacre of 1875 was the inaugural event to the infamous Mississippi Plan devised by white Democrats to “redeem” the state from the political control of newly enfranchised freedmen and the Republican Party during the 1875 election. It also served as the impetus for the issuance of Pres. Ulysses S. Grant’s controversial policy of federal nonintervention concerning matters of race in southern states, which eventually paved the way for the rise of Jim Crow laws and segregation.
Freedmen first began voting in Mississippi in 1867, and the 1875 election promised to continue the incorporation of black men within the state’s political process. With polls set to open on November 2, the Mississippi Republican Party planned political rallies on September 4 at Utica and Clinton in Hinds County and at Vernon in nearby Madison County. In Clinton (which is located less than ten miles west of the state capital, Jackson), whole families of black Republicans gathered at Moss Hill, the site of a former plantation destroyed by Union troops during the Vicksburg Campaign of 1863. Estimates of the attendance that day ranged from 1,500 to 2,500, nearly all consisting of freedpeople and their families who gathered to enjoy an afternoon of picnicking and politics. There were also approximately seventy-five white persons present, at least eighteen of whom were armed and intoxicated White Liners, essentially a paramilitary unit of the Mississippi Democratic Party made up of ex-Confederate soldiers and their descendants.