Our History is American History - Post Civil War: Black Codes

If you want to irritate, alienate, frustrate, and aggravate me INSTANTLY, all you have to do is bring up the fact that other races had slaves or that Africans sold other Africans into slavery. 😡 And if I wasn't a woman who was trying to get into heaven, I would probably respond with "WTF does that have to do with MY ANCESTORS and chattel slavery, beatings, rape, brutality, murders, injustice, separation on families that occurred once enslaved Africans were brought to this country???" So please don't say that to me, ok? Ok! I'm heaven-bound. I don't know why this part of history pricks at my soul so much. I definitely get why many African Americans say they get tired of slave movies and movies that capitalize on Black trauma. But this is the part of the story that has been skipped. In school, it went from Emancipation to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement. For years, I heard my mom talk about Jim Crow and I thought it was a person not a set of laws named after a minstrel show character. Anyhoo, difficult as it is, we have to fill in the gaps. 

Black code, in U.S. history, any of numerous laws enacted in the states of the former Confederacy after the American Civil War and intended to assure the continuance of white supremacy. Enacted in 1865 and 1866, the laws were designed to replace the social controls of slavery that had been removed by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The black codes definitely had their roots in the slave codes that had formerly been in effect. The premise behind chattel slavery in America was that slaves were property, and, as such, they had few or no legal rights. The slave codes, in their many loosely defined forms, were seen as effective tools against slave unrest, particularly as a hedge against uprisings and runaways. Enforcement of slave codes also varied, but corporal punishment was widely and harshly employed.

Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, the question of freed Black people's status in the postwar South was still very much unresolved. Under black codes, many states required Black people to sign yearly labor contracts; if they refused, they risked being arrested, fined and forced into unpaid labor. Even as former enslaved people fought to assert their independence and gain economic autonomy during the earliest years of Reconstruction, white landowners acted to control the labor force through a system similar to the one that had existed during slavery. White Southerners, seeking to control the freedmen (former slaves), devised special state law codes, while many Northerners saw these codes as blatant attempts to restore slavery.

In April 1865, as the war drew to a close, Lincoln shocked many by proposing limited suffrage for African Americans in the South. He was assassinated days later, however, and his successor Andrew Johnson would be the one to preside over the beginning of Reconstruction. Johnson, a former senator from Tennessee who had remained loyal to the Union during the war, was a firm supporter of states’ rights and believed the federal government had no say in issues such as voting requirements at the state level. Under his Reconstruction policies, which began in May 1865, the former Confederate states were required to uphold the abolition of slavery (made official by the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), swear loyalty to the Union, and pay off their war debt. Beyond those limitations, the states and their ruling class—traditionally dominated by white planters—were given a relatively free hand in rebuilding their own governments.

The state legislatures began to pass laws limiting the freedom of the former slaves. These laws mirrored those of colonial times, which placed severe restrictions on both slaves and emancipated blacks. Neither of these groups could vote, serve on juries, travel freely, or work in occupations of their choice. Even their marriages were outside the law. The black codes varied from state to state but were all intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labor, and all continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves. There were vagrancy laws that declared a black person to be vagrant if unemployed and without permanent residence; a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labor if unable to pay the fine. There were also apprentice laws that made black orphans and dependents available for hire to whites, and commercial laws that excluded blacks from certain trades and businesses and restricted their ownership of property.

Nearly all the southern states would enact their own black codes in 1865 and 1866. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans—including the right to buy and own property, marry, make contracts and testify in court (only in cases involving people of their own race)—their primary purpose was to restrict Black peoples’ labor and activity. Mississippi and South Carolina enacted the first black codes. Mississippi’s law required Black people to have written evidence of employment for the coming year each January; if they left before the end of the contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and were subject to arrest. In South Carolina, a law prohibited Black people from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100. This provision hit free Black people already living in Charleston and former slave artisans especially hard. In both states, Black people were given heavy penalties for vagrancy, including forced plantation labor in some cases.

It was Northern reaction to the black codes (as well as to the bloody antiblack riots in Memphis, Tennessee, and New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1866; that helped produce Radical Reconstruction (1865–77) and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created in 1865 to help the former slaves. By 1877, when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, Black people had seen little improvement in their economic and social status, and the vigorous efforts of white supremacist forces throughout the region had undone the political gains they had made. Discrimination would continue in America with the rise of Jim Crow laws, but would inspire the civil rights movement to come.