Fearing the consequences of the abolition of slavery after the Civil War, southern states began passing laws designed to limit the rights of newly freed African Americans.
The months immediately following the end of the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) were a period of great uncertainty. The Union’s wartime president, Abraham Lincoln, had been assassinated, and his successor, Andrew Johnson, was untested as a leader. Strong leadership could not be expected from Capitol Hill, either, as Congress had gone into a long recess. Within the defeated southern states, a host of questions required immediate answers. Foremost among these were questions relating to the new role of the recently freed slaves. Would they continue to furnish an economical and reliable labor force for southern cotton planters? Would they try to exact subtle or blatant revenge upon their former masters? Should lawmakers grant them the vote? Should the U.S. government give them land? Should the states pay the cost of their basic education? What legal rights would these five million African Americans enjoy in the postbellum South?
President Johnson
As reconstituted southern state legislatures began to meet, their exclusively white members were eager to pass laws that would answer some of the nagging questions about the future place of African Americans in southern society. Many legislators believed former slaves would not work unless forced to do so, and they feared the double specter of an economy without a labor supply and a huge mass of discontented black people who would live on charity or plunder. In earlier years, laws known as the slave codes had controlled the African American population. Some lawmakers now called for a renewal of the slave codes to control the freed black population.
Mississippi’s legislature was the first to take up the question of African American rights. When it met in October, 1865, it quickly fell into arguments over what policies on racial matters should be enacted. Nearly half the legislators favored laws that would, in almost every way, return African Americans to the position they had occupied in the time of slavery. However, Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys
As its title promised, Mississippi’s new law did confer some rights on African Americans that they had not enjoyed as slaves. These rights included the right to sue and be sued, the right to swear out criminal complaints against others, the right to purchase or inherit land, the right to marry, and the right to draw up labor or other contracts. Although the title of the law mentions civil rights, the law was remarkable primarily for the rights that it denied to African Americans. While it gave African Americans the right to own land, it denied them the right to rent rural land, thereby helping to perpetuate the existence of a large class of landless agricultural workers who would have to work for low wages. The act recognized the right of African Americans to marry but also provided that interracial marriage
Most ominous was the provision in Mississippi’s law that every black Mississippian sign a one-year labor contract by the first of each year and honor that contract. Should employees leave their employers before the end of the year, law-enforcement officers were empowered to return them forcibly to their places of employment. In a provision reminiscent of the old laws that forbade giving help to runaway slaves, this new law made it a crime to give food, clothing, or shelter to black workers who left their employers while still under contract. The punishment for helping runaways was up to two months in jail. Those who helped fugitives find work in states other than Mississippi could be sentenced for up to six months in jail. Once again, securing a stable labor supply for the state was at the forefront of lawmakers’ goals.
Contemporary Currier & Ives print of a cartoon commenting on the refusal of southern states to acknowledge the changed status of African Americans after the Civil War. As the white man is about to swept over a cataract, he refuses to accept the help of a free black man, while President Ulysses S. Grant chides him.
After Mississippi passed this first post-Civil War black code, a flood of other laws soon followed in Mississippi and the other southern states. South Carolina’s black codes
South Carolina and Mississippi both enacted severe vagrancy laws that called for the arrest of idle persons, drunkards, gamblers, wanderers, fighters, people who wasted their pay, circus hands, actors, and even jugglers. If these persons were African American, they were to be considered vagrants and fined up to one hundred dollars and imprisoned. If they could not pay their fines, their labor would be auctioned off to white employers, and their wages could be used to satisfy their fines.
Black codes varied from state to state, but their northern opponents said they all had the common goal of returning the freed slaves to a system equivalent to bondage. In some southern states, African Americans were prohibited from owning guns. In other states, they were forbidden to assemble in groups or subjected to evening curfews. President Johnson
The black codes were barely enforced. Overturned by the actions of occupying generals during Reconstruction, and later by the U.S. courts, which found them in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment, they were important chiefly for fueling a conflict in Washington between Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction plan and Congress’s insistence that the basic rights of African Americans be protected. These codes are also important for their role in bringing about passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although African American rights generally were protected between 1866 and 1876, the southern states found many ways to draft laws that were color-blind on their face but that could be enforced in a racially biased way. After Reconstruction, few southern elected officials, and few officeholders nationwide, were interested in championing African American civil rights.
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Bankston, Carl L., III, ed. African American History. 3 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2005. Encyclopedic reference work on African American history that includes entries on the black codes, civil rights laws, and many related subjects. -
Cohen, William. “Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South, 1865-1940: A Preliminary Analysis.” Journal of Southern History 42 (February, 1976): 35-50. Discusses the larger picture of black labor and its lack of freedoms, linking the black codes to peonage and to the South’s convict labor system. -
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. This massive volume is the basic history of Reconstruction; chapter 5 covers the black codes and related events. -
Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 8th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. This standard history of the black experience in America examines the changes that former slaves went through in the decades following the Civil War. -
Harris, William C. Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Discusses the drafting of Mississippi’s black codes, which are especially important because they were a model for other southern state legislatures. -
Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Tells the Reconstruction story as much through the eyes of the freed slaves as from the point of view of white government officials. -
Rasmussen, R. Kent. Farewell to Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of Segregation in America. New York: Facts On File, 1997. This brief but comprehensive history of segregation in U.S. history, which is written for young adults, examines the entire history of racially discriminatory legislation. -
Wilson, Theodore B. The Black Codes of the South. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1965. The only book exclusively devoted to the black codes. Provides thoughtful analysis of the meaning of these laws in southern and African American history.
Ohio Enacts the First Black Codes
Reconstruction of the South
Congress Creates the Freedmen’s Bureau
Birth of the Ku Klux Klan
Civil Rights Act of 1866
Memphis and New Orleans Race Riots
Fourteenth Amendment Is Ratified
Civil Rights Cases
Mississippi Constitution Disfranchises Black Voters
Plessy v. Ferguson
Andrew Johnson; Thaddeus Stevens.