1870: A print celebrating the passage of the 15th Amendment, which made it illegal to deny anyone the right to vote on racial grounds. Credit – MPI/Getty Images

FIn the wake of Kamala Harris’ defeat and the GOP’s congressional successes in the 2024 elections, many Democrats are expressing not only anger and disappointment, but also fear. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will give him the opportunity to ensure that the Supreme Court remains firmly in conservative hands for the foreseeable future. Many Democrats fear the radical and draconian policies Trump promises to implement after taking office: Cancellation of broadcast licenses of critical media organizations, punishing politicians and all states that do not support him, and perhaps most infamously, a claim that he would “A dictator from day one.”

Although worrying, these threats are far from new. In fact, they reflect what conservatives did after the Civil War. During Reconstruction, former confederates pushed claims of fraud, launched deregistration campaigns, and even destroyed their opponents’ physical ballots. But the most destructive tool conservatives had in 1868 was white Americans’ susceptibility to racist rhetoric; This force remains an animating force in American politics today.

The election of 1868 remains the most violent in US history. Black Americans had just gained the right to vote thanks to the Reconstruction Acts and the 14th Amendment, but formal suffrage rights did not guarantee that Black Americans could exercise that right without threat of retaliation. Although federal troops occupied parts of the South to prevent political and racial violence, St. Tammany Parish, La. There was no meaningful federal presence in most regions.

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In 1868, conservatives supported Horatio Seymour against Ulysses S. Grant in a campaign built on the promise of disenfranchisement of Black Americans, and his rhetoric sparked widespread violence. The Ku Klux Klan launched bloody campaigns terrorizing freedmen in the South to prevent newly eligible Black men from voting. In the months before the 1868 election, the Klan had killed at least 2,000 freedmen in the state of Louisiana; many more had been intimidated, attacked or tortured. Klan members burned the homes of Black Americans, gunned down entire families, assassinated elected officials, destroyed voter records, and stole firearms from freedmen to ensure they could not fight back. It is impossible to calculate the death toll in what some scholars call the “Killing Fields of 1868,” but contemporaries estimated the number to be in the tens of thousands, and the majority of the victims were Black women, men, and children. But these dire efforts failed in their attempt to demoralize Black voters. Despite the violence and insults black Americans faced at the polls in 1868, hundreds of thousands marched to voting booths in the years that followed.

On June 10, 1869, formerly enslaved blacksmith Mumford McCoy walked into his hometown of St. Louis during the election. He appeared before a congressional investigation in New Orleans to testify about the destruction in Tammany. Mumford McCoy witnessed this violence firsthand. The previous year, the Klan had murdered local coroner John Kemp (one of the first Black men to hold that position in the United States), brutalized a local Black preacher and his family, and destroyed the congregation’s church. McCoy had built it. Hearing McCoy describe these horrors, one of the investigators asked him: “Haven’t you lost your courage, your spirit, your faith?”

“No sir,” McCoy replied. “I didn’t lose anything. It just gave me greater courage and perseverance.”

And he wasn’t alone.

After 1868, Black Americans in the South reestablished their political organizations, and some formed militias to protect themselves against Klan violence. This reconstituted political front has proven to be incredibly effective. For example, in Shreveport, La., a group of white terrorists summarily executed a group of Black men and boys at a local brickyard just weeks before the 1868 election and, through violence and intimidation, ensured that the church would not register a single person. . Republican vote. But after black suffrage was enshrined in the Constitution with the 15th Amendment two years later, more than a thousand Black Americans, both men and women, marched into Shreveport “like well-trained soldiers who had received their orders,” as one witness put it. . Only to vote in the 1870 congressional elections, undaunted by the violence they had witnessed two years earlier. As a result of their bravery, Black voters carried Shreveport and Caddo Parish for the Republican Party, then still known as the party of Lincoln and the party of the formerly enslaved.

In the years that followed, black voters made surprising gains in states that witnessed some of the nation’s worst massacres, including Georgia, Mississippi and South Carolina. Even McCoy’s home state of Louisiana, a state swayed by conservatives through intimidation and violence in 1868, saw each of its Congressional districts flip Republican two years later, thanks almost exclusively to the dogged efforts of Black voters.

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Similar to their counterparts in the civil rights movement a century later, Black Americans during Reconstruction presented a strong, united front in the face of racist rhetoric and political violence. They used their solidarity to their advantage, developing strategies for how to resist disenfranchisement and, most importantly, refusing to allow themselves to succumb to defeatism. Rather than allowing themselves to be demoralized by the assassinations of their leaders, the constant attacks on their communities, and the weak support of their white allies, America’s early Black voters saw each of these obstacles as another reason to engage politically.

Those who endured slavery in the United States deeply understood the flaws of American democracy in a way no one today can. Yet even in the wake of violent attacks on their communities and stunning election defeats, they still voted, protested, and ran for office. From where? Because allowing former Confederates and former enslavers to return to unchecked positions of power would herald the end of freedom in the post-emancipation South.

In the following years, former Confederates continued to use violence and intimidation against Black Americans to force them out of politics, and although Black Americans bravely fought for their political rights, their white allies in the North and South withdrew from Reconstruction and allowed many of them to resign from politics. the relegation of freed people to a state of functional slavery in the Jim Crow South.

But even after being abandoned by their allies, Black Americans persisted. Through the grassroots populist movements of the 1880s and 1890s, through labor organizations like the Brotherhood of Sleeping Carriages, and through simple acts of survival, Black Americans continued to fight because, no matter how difficult it was to imagine, they still had hope. The American project and an unwavering understanding that they deserve to be in it.

Maybe Democrats can take a page from Mumford McCoy’s book and maintain their courage, spirit, and faith rather than letting Republicans’ landslide victories discourage them. The political obstacles that Democrats face are very serious, but it is the existence of these threats that makes political participation so important in the first place. Those disappointed in this month’s outcome should try to emulate America’s first Black voters and let the great challenges ahead instill in them “better courage and ambition.”

J. Jacob Calhoun is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia Nau Center for Civil War History. Explores 19th-century American history, including the history of black politics.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Read more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of TIME editors.

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