allies, such as Print Matthews, were lynched and murdered by armed Democratic paramilitaries as a result. Although slavery may have been legally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment, the ideology that the Confederates and Democrats had used to justify it did not, with it now being used by them as the rationale to deny the freed slaves and African Americans basic civil rights and freedoms. As former abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted in a December 1869 speech delivered in Boston, Massachusetts: In the years following the American Civil War, forces of the U.S. Army were stationed in the readmitted Southern U.S. states, protecting the lives and rights of African Americans and freed slaves. The Democrats were vehemently opposed to the presence of the U.S. military being there, for it prevented a violent Democratic takeover of said states. However, there were not enough army soldiers to be everywhere at all times, and, as such, although they could supervise voter registration to be fair and impartial, they could not protect freedmen as they went to and from the voter registration office to register, which resulted in many freedmen being lynched. With violence against freedmen increasing, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was signed into law by Republican U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant to protect them. However, that law would be short-lived, as the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1883. In August 1877, former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, who had left office several months prior and was embarking on a tour of the world, wrote in a letter from London to U.S. Navy officer Daniel Ammen after the Compromise of 1877, about the contradictions of the Democrats in their vocal support for using overwhelming military force to quell workers' strikes, but objecting when it was used to defend the rights of African American voters from being infringed upon. He stated that the U.S. government should protect the rights of all its citizens from being infringed upon, regardless of their color: By 1890, following years of terrorism and paramilitary violence, African Americans had "largely disappeared from the arena of Southern politics". The Democrats had wrested control of Mississippi state's government to rid it of the Republican Party's influences, with the state's last 19th century Republican governor, Adelbert Ames, resigning from office in 1876 due to threats of impeachment by a hostile legislature. The previous year, in November 1875, terrorists and Democrats had forcibly