By this point, in the middle of the 1870s, white vigilantism against African Americans had grown so intense that President Ulysses S. Grant considered trying to acquire the Dominican Republic as a homeland for freedmen and women. Grant had initiated his annexation effort prior to a massacre that took place on Easter Sunday 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, which left between sixty-two and a hundred and fifty African Americans dead at the hands of a white mob.
