The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of
African Americans
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...
(free and freed blacks). In 1832,
James Kent James Kent may refer to:
*James Kent (jurist) (1763–1847), American jurist and legal scholar
* James Kent (composer) (1700–1776), English composer
*James Kent, better known as Perturbator, French electronic/synthwave musician
*James Tyler Kent ...
wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood; and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and many Northern states had them, it was the Southern U.S. states that codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of them were passed in 1865 and 1866 by
Southern states, after the
American Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states th ...
, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and to compel them to work for low or no wages.
Since the colonial period, colonies and states had passed laws that discriminated against
free Blacks. In the South, these were generally included in "
slave codes
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
Most slave codes were concerned with the rights and duties of free people in regards to ensla ...
"; the goal was to suppress the influence of free blacks (particularly after slave rebellions) because of their potential influence on slaves. Restrictions included prohibiting them from voting (North Carolina had allowed this before 1831), bearing arms, gathering in groups for worship, and learning to read and write. The purpose of these laws was to preserve slavery in slave societies.
Before the war, Northern states that had prohibited slavery also enacted laws similar to the slave codes and the later Black Codes: Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan,
['' The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio'' by Stephen Middleton. (2005. Ohio University Press]
(https://www.ohioswallow.com/book/The+Black+Laws
/ref> and New York enacted laws to discourage free blacks from residing in those states. They were denied equal political rights, including the right to vote, the right to attend public schools, and the right to equal treatment under the law. Some of the Northern states, those which had them, repealed such laws around the same time that the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment.
In the first two years after the Civil War, white-dominated Southern legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. (The name "Black Codes" was given by "negro leaders and the Republican organs", according to historian John S. Reynolds.) Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of whites trying to maintain political dominance and suppress the freedmen
A freedman or freedwoman is a formerly enslaved person who has been released from slavery, usually by legal means. Historically, enslaved people were freed by manumission (granted freedom by their captor-owners), abolitionism, emancipation (gra ...
, newly emancipated African-Americans. They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor of freedmen, as slavery had been replaced by a free labor system. Although freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were greatly restricted by the Black Codes. The defining feature of the Black Codes was broad vagrancy law, which allowed local authorities to arrest freedpeople for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor. This period was the start of the convict lease
Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor which was practiced historically in the Southern United States, the laborers being mainly African-American men; it was ended during the 20th century. (Convict labor in general continues; f ...
system, also described as "slavery by another name" by Douglas Blackmon
Douglas A. Blackmon (born 1964) is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, '' Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.''
Early life and education
...
in his 2008 book of this title.[Douglas Blackmon, '' Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II'', New York: Doubleday, 2008]
Background
Vagrancy laws
Vagrancy is the condition of homelessness without regular employment or income. Vagrants (also known as bums, vagabonds, rogues, tramps or drifters) usually live in poverty and support themselves by begging, scavenging, petty theft, temporar ...
date to the end of feudalism
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structur ...
in Europe. Introduced by aristocratic and landowning classes, they had the dual purpose of restricting access of "undesirable" classes to public spaces and of ensuring a labor pool. Serf
Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed ...
s were not emancipated from their land.
Before the Civil War
Southern states
"Black Codes" in the antebellum South
In History of the Southern United States, the history of the Southern United States, the Antebellum Period (from la, ante bellum, lit=Status quo ante bellum, before the war) spanned the Treaty of Ghent, end of the War of 1812 to the start of ...
strongly regulated the activities and behavior of blacks, especially free Blacks, who were not considered citizens. Chattel slaves basically lived under the complete control of their owners, so there was little need for extensive legislation. "All Southern states imposed at least minimal limits on slave punishment, for example, by making murder or life-threatening injury of slaves a crime, and a few states allowed slaves a limited right of self-defense."[Ranney, ''In the Wake of Slavery'' (2006), p. 15.] As slaves could not use the courts or sheriff, or give testimony against a white man, in practice these meant little.
North Carolina restricted slaves from leaving their plantation; if a male slave wished to court
A court is any person or institution, often as a government institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance ...
a female slave on another property, he needed a pass in order to pursue this relationship. Without one he risked severe punishment at the hands of the patrollers.
Free blacks presented a challenge to the boundaries of white-dominated society. In many Southern states, particularly after Nat Turner's insurrection of 1831, they were denied the rights of citizens to assemble in groups, bear arms
The right to keep and bear arms (often referred to as the right to bear arms) is a right for people to possess weapons (arms) for the preservation of life, liberty, and property. The purpose of gun rights is for self-defense, including securi ...
, learn to read and write, exercise free speech, or testify against white people in Court.[Forte, "Spiritual Equality" (1998), p. 579–580.] After 1810, states made manumission
Manumission, or enfranchisement, is the act of freeing enslaved people by their enslavers. Different approaches to manumission were developed, each specific to the time and place of a particular society. Historian Verene Shepherd states that t ...
s of slaves more difficult to obtain, in some states requiring an act of the legislature for each case of manumission. This sharply reduced the incidence of planters freeing slaves.[
All the slave states passed ]anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalization, criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different R ...
, banning the marriage of white and black people.
Between 1687 and 1865, Virginia enacted more than 130 slave statutes, among which were seven major slave codes, with some containing more than fifty provisions.
Maryland passed vagrancy and apprentice laws, and required Blacks to obtain licenses from Whites before doing business. It prohibited immigration of free Blacks until 1865.[DuBois, ''Black Reconstruction'' (1935), p]
564
Most of the Maryland Black Code was repealed in the Constitution of 1867. Black women were not allowed to testify against white men with whom they had children, giving them a status similar to wives.
Northern states
As the abolitionist
Abolitionism, or the abolitionist movement, is the movement to end slavery. In Western Europe and the Americas, abolitionism was a historic movement that sought to end the Atlantic slave trade and liberate the enslaved people.
The British ...
movement gained force and the Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was a network of clandestine routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early- to mid-19th century. It was used by enslaved African Americans primarily to escape into free states and Canada. T ...
helped fugitive slave
In the United States, fugitive slaves or runaway slaves were terms used in the 18th and 19th century to describe people who fled slavery. The term also refers to the federal Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. Such people are also called free ...
s escape to the North, concern about Black people heightened among Northern white people. Territories and states near the slave states did not welcome freed Black people. But north of the Mason–Dixon line
The Mason–Dixon line, also called the Mason and Dixon line or Mason's and Dixon's line, is a demarcation line separating four U.S. states, forming part of the borders of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, and West Virginia (part of Virginia ...
, anti-Black laws were generally less severe. Some public spaces were segregated, and Black people generally did not have the right to vote. In Oregon
Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...
, Black people were forbidden to settle, marry, or sign contracts. In Ohio
Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...
, Black people required a certificate they were free and a good behavior bond.
All the slave states passed anti-miscegenation laws
Anti-miscegenation laws or miscegenation laws are laws that enforce racial segregation at the level of marriage and intimate relationships by criminalization, criminalizing interracial marriage and sometimes also sex between members of different R ...
, banning the marriage of white and Black people, as did several new free states of the former Northwest Territory, including Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois shared borders with the slave states across the Ohio and Mississippi rivers (Kentucky, Missouri, and Virginia respectively). The population of the southern parts of these states had generally migrated from the Upper South; their culture and values were more akin to those of the South across the river than those of the northern settlers, who had migrated from New England and New York. In some states these codes included vagrancy laws that targeted unemployed Black people, apprentice laws that made Black orphans and dependents available for hire to white people, and commercial laws that excluded Black people from certain trades and businesses and restricted their ownership of property.
The Indiana Legislature decreed in 1843 that only white students could attend the public schools. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution banned Black people from settling in the state. Anyone who helped Black people settle in the state or employed Black settlers could be fined. Article 13 had the most popular vote among Hoosiers compared to all other articles voted upon. The Supreme Court declared Article 13 invalid in 1866.
The 1848 Constitution of Illinois contributed to the state legislature passing one of the harshest Black Code systems in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 prohibited any Black persons from outside of the state from staying in the state for more than ten days, subjecting Black people who violated that rule to arrest, detention, a $50 fine, or deportation. However, while slavery was illegal in Illinois, landowners in the southern parts of the state would legally bring in slaves from adjacent Kentucky, and force them to do agricultural work for no wages. They had to be removed from the state for one day each year, thus preventing them from being citizens of Illinois and receiving the protection of its laws.
In some states, Black Code legislation used text directly from the slave codes, simply substituting ''Negro'' or other words in place of ''slave''.
Under Union occupation
The Union Army
During the American Civil War, the Union Army, also known as the Federal Army and the Northern Army, referring to the United States Army, was the land force that fought to preserve the Union (American Civil War), Union of the collective U.S. st ...
relied on the labor of newly freed people, and did not always treat them fairly. Thomas W. Knox
Thomas Wallace Knox (June 26, 1835 - January 6, 1896) was a journalist, author, and world traveler, known primarily for his work as a ''New York Herald'' correspondent during the American Civil War. As an author, Knox wrote over 45 books, includi ...
wrote: "The difference between working for nothing as a slave, and working for the same wages under the Yankees, was not always perceptible." At the same time, military officials resisted local attempts to apply pre-war laws to the freed people. After the Emancipation Proclamation, the Army conscripted Black "vagrants" and sometimes others.
The Union Army applied the northern wage system of free labor to freedmen after the Emancipation Proclamation; they effectively upgraded free Blacks from "contraband
Contraband (from Medieval French ''contrebande'' "smuggling") refers to any item that, relating to its nature, is illegal to be possessed or sold. It is used for goods that by their nature are considered too dangerous or offensive in the eyes o ...
" status. General Nathaniel P. Banks
Nathaniel Prentice (or Prentiss) Banks (January 30, 1816 – September 1, 1894) was an American politician from Massachusetts and a Union general during the Civil War. A millworker by background, Banks was prominent in local debating societies, ...
in Louisiana initiated a system of wage labor in February 1863 in Louisiana; General Lorenzo Thomas
Lorenzo Thomas (October 26, 1804 – March 2, 1875) was a career United States Army officer who was Adjutant General of the Army at the beginning of the American Civil War. After the war, he was appointed temporary Secretary of War by U.S. ...
implemented a similar system in Mississippi.[Belz, ''A New Birth of Freedom'' (2000), pp. 45–46.] The Banks-Thomas system offered Blacks $10 a month, with the Army's commitment to provide rations, clothing, and medicine. The worker would have to agree to an unbreakable one-year contract. In 1864, Thomas expanded the system to Tennessee, and allowed white landowners near the Nashville
Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the seat of Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the most populous city in the state, 21st most-populous city in the U.S., and the ...
contraband camp to rent the labor of refugees.
Against opposition from elements of the Republican Party, Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...
accepted this system as a step on the path to gradual emancipation.[Forte, "Spiritual Equality" (1998), pp. 589–590. Quote: "Much more troublesome was the Union's treatment of the freed slaves in Louisiana and the South as a whole. The Union military authorities in the South approved a plan of apprenticeship for the freed black, a policy that Lincoln seemed to accept, at least as an interim measure 'conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation'."] Abolitionists continued to criticize the labor system. Wendell Phillips
Wendell Phillips (November 29, 1811 – February 2, 1884) was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, orator, and attorney.
According to George Lewis Ruffin, a Black attorney, Phillips was seen by many Blacks as "the one whi ...
said that Lincoln's proclamation had "free the slave, but ignore the Negro", calling the Banks-Thomas year-long contracts tantamount to serfdom. The ''Worcester Spy
The ''Worcester Spy'', originally known as the ''Massachusetts Spy'' was a newspaper founded in 1770 in Boston, Massachusetts by Isaiah Thomas, dedicated to supporting the Revolutionary cause against the British. In the 19th century, it became a ...
'' described the government's answer to slavery as "something worse than failure."
Postwar years
As the war ended, the US Army implemented Black Codes to regulate the behavior of black people in general society. Although the Freedmen's Bureau
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau, was an agency of early Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. It was established on March 3, 1865, and operated briefly as a ...
had a mandate to protect blacks from a hostile Southern environment, it also sought to keep blacks in their place as laborers in order to allow production on the plantations to resume so that the South could revive its economy. The Freedmen's Bureau cooperated with Southern authorities in rounding up black "vagrants" and placing them in contract work.[Wormser, ''The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow'' (2003), p. 11.] In some places, it supported owners to maintain control of young slaves as apprentices
Apprenticeship is a system for training a new generation of practitioners of a trade or profession with on-the-job training and often some accompanying study (classroom work and reading). Apprenticeships can also enable practitioners to gain a ...
.
New restrictions were placed on intermarriage, concubinage, and miscegenation with Black people in Arizona in 1864, California in 1880, Colorado in 1864, Florida, Indiana in 1905, Kentucky in 1866, Montana in 1909, Nebraska in 1865, Nevada in 1912, North Dakota in 1943, Ohio 1877, Oregon in 1867, Rhode Island in 1872, South Dakota in 1913, Tennessee in 1870, Texas in 1858, Utah in 1888, Virginia, Washington in 1866 but promptly repealed it in 1867, West Virginia in 1863 but overturned by Loving v Virginia
''Loving v. Virginia'', 388 U.S. 1 (1967), was a landmark civil rights decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in which the Court ruled that laws banning interracial marriage violate the Equal Protection and Due Process Clauses of the Fourteenth A ...
in 1967, and Wyoming in 1908. In all, twenty-one states put in place Jim Crow laws against miscegenation. Free whites could no longer marry a slave and thereby emancipate her and her children, and no freedman could receive a donation or inheritance from a white person.[
Soon after the end of slavery, white planters encountered a ]labor shortage
In economics, a shortage or excess demand is a situation in which the demand for a product or service exceeds its supply in a market. It is the opposite of an excess supply ( surplus).
Definitions
In a perfect market (one that matches a si ...
and sought a way to manage it. Although blacks did not all abruptly stop working, they did try to work less. In particular, many sought to reduce their Saturday work hours, and women wanted to spend more time on child care
Child care, otherwise known as day care, is the care and supervision of a child or multiple children at a time, whose ages range from two weeks of age to 18 years. Although most parents spend a significant amount of time caring for their child(r ...
. In the view of one contemporary economist, freed people exhibited this "noncapitalist behavior" because the condition of being owned had "shielded the slaves from the market economy
A market economy is an economic system in which the decisions regarding investment, production and distribution to the consumers are guided by the price signals created by the forces of supply and demand, where all suppliers and consumers ...
" and they were therefore unable to perform "careful calculation of economic opportunities".
An alternative explanation treats the labor slowdown as a form of gaining leverage through collective action. Another possibility is that freed blacks assigned value to leisure and family time in excess of the monetary value of additional paid labor. Indeed, freedpeople certainly did not ''want'' to work the long hours that had been forced upon them for their whole lives. Whatever its causes, the sudden reduction of available labor posed a challenge to the Southern economy, which had relied upon intense physical labor to profitably harvest cash crop
A cash crop or profit crop is an Agriculture, agricultural crop which is grown to sell for profit. It is typically purchased by parties separate from a farm. The term is used to differentiate marketed crops from staple crop (or "subsistence crop") ...
s, particularly King Cotton
"King Cotton" is a slogan that summarized the strategy used before the American Civil War (of 1861–1865) by secessionists in the southern states (the future Confederate States of America) to claim the feasibility of secession and to prove ther ...
.
Southern Whites also perceived Black vagrancy as a sudden and dangerous social problem.
Preexisting White American belief of Black inferiority informed post-war attitudes and White racial dominance continued to be culturally embedded; Whites believed both that Black people were destined for servitude and that they would not work unless physically compelled. For their part, free Blacks no longer felt compelled to show conspicuous deference to White people. The enslaved also strove to create a semi-autonomous social world, removed from the plantation and the gaze of the slave owner. The racial divisions which slavery had created immediately became more obvious. Blacks also bore the brunt of Southern anger over defeat in the War.
Legislation on the status of freedpeople was often mandated by constitutional conventions held in 1865. Mississippi, South Carolina, and Georgia all included language in their new state constitutions which instructed the legislature to "guard them and the State against any evils that may arise from their sudden emancipation".[Wilson, ''Black Codes'' (1965), p. 63.] The Florida convention of October 1865 included a vagrancy ordinance that was in effect until process Black Codes could be passed through the regular legislative process.
Black Codes restricted black people's right to own
Ownership is the state or fact of legal possession and control over property, which may be any asset, tangible or intangible. Ownership can involve multiple rights, collectively referred to as title, which may be separated and held by different ...
property, conduct business, buy and lease
A lease is a contractual arrangement calling for the user (referred to as the ''lessee'') to pay the owner (referred to as the ''lessor'') for the use of an asset. Property, buildings and vehicles are common assets that are leased. Industrial ...
land, and move freely through public spaces. A central element of the Black Codes were vagrancy laws. States criminalized men who were out of work, or who were not working at a job whites recognized. Failure to pay a certain tax, or to comply with other laws, could also be construed as vagrancy.
Nine Southern states updated their vagrancy laws in 1865–1866. Of these, eight allowed convict leasing
Convict leasing was a system of forced penal labor which was practiced historically in the Southern United States, the laborers being mainly African-American men; it was ended during the 20th century. (Convict labor in general continues; f ...
(a system in which state prison hired out convicts for labor) and five allowed prisoner labor for public works projects. This created a system that established incentives to arrest black men, as convicts were supplied to local governments and planters as free workers. The planters or other supervisors were responsible for their board and food, and black convicts were kept in miserable conditions. As Douglas Blackmon
Douglas A. Blackmon (born 1964) is an American writer and journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for his book, '' Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.''
Early life and education
...
wrote, it was "slavery by another name". Because of their reliance on convict leasing, Southern states did not build any prisons until the late 19th century.
Another important part of the Codes were the annual labor contracts, which Black people had to keep and present to authorities to avoid vagrancy charges.[Daniel, ''Metamorphosis of Slavery'' (1979), p. 96. "The yearly contract was one of the most important elements in the landlord's control over labor — not what the contract stated explicitly, but what it implied and how it was executed. The pattern emerged immediately after the war. With encouragement from the Freedmen's Bureau, blacks signed up for a year's work, and the vigilant eyes of federal officials noted that many contracts resembled slavery."][Wormser, ''The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow'' (2003), p. 8.]
Strict punishments against theft also served to ensnare many people in the legal system. Previously, Blacks had been part of the domestic economy on a plantation, and were more or less able to use supplies that were available. After emancipation, the same act performed by someone working the same land might be labeled as theft, leading to arrest and involuntary labor.
Some states explicitly curtailed Black people's right to bear arms, justifying these laws with claims of imminent insurrection.[DuBois, ''Black Reconstruction'' (1935), p]
172
In Mississippi and Alabama, these laws were enforced through the creation of special militias.
Historian Samuel McCall, who published a biography of abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens
Thaddeus Stevens (April 4, 1792August 11, 1868) was a member of the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, one of the leaders of the Radical Republican faction of the Republican Party during the 1860s. A fierce opponent of sla ...
, commented in 1899 that the Black Codes had "established a condition but little better than that of slavery, and in one important respect far worse": by severing the property relationship, they had diminished the incentive for property owners to ensure the relative health and survival of their workers.
Regarding the question of whether Southern legislatures deliberately tried to maintain white supremacy, Beverly Forehand writes: "This decision was not a conscious one on the part of white legislators. It was simply an accepted conclusion."
During Reconstruction, state legislatures passed some laws that established some positive rights for freedmen. States legalized Black marriages and in some cases increased the rights of freedmen to own property and conduct commerce.
Reconstruction and Jim Crow
The Black Codes outraged public opinion in the North because it seemed the South was creating a form of quasi-slavery to negate the results of the war. When the Radical 39th Congress re-convened in December 1865, it was generally furious about the developments that had transpired during Johnson's Presidential Reconstruction
The Reconstruction era was a period in American history following the American Civil War (1861–1865) and lasting until approximately the Compromise of 1877. During Reconstruction, attempts were made to rebuild the country after the blood ...
. The Black Codes, along with the appointment of prominent Confederates to Congress, signified that the South had been emboldened by Johnson and intended to maintain its old political order. Railing against the Black Codes as returns to slavery in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (, enacted April 9, 1866, reenacted 1870) was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the Amer ...
, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the Second Freedmen's Bureau Bill.[Forte, "Spiritual Equality" (1998), p. 605–608.]
The Memphis Riots in May 1866 and the New Orleans Riot
The New Orleans Massacre of 1866 occurred on July 30, when a peaceful demonstration of mostly Black Freedmen was set upon by a mob of white rioters, many of whom had been soldiers of the recently defeated Confederate States of America, leading t ...
in July brought additional attention and urgency to the racial tension state-sanctioned racism permeating the South.
After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republican Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts
The Reconstruction Acts, or the Military Reconstruction Acts, (March 2, 1867, 14 Stat. 428-430, c.153; March 23, 1867, 15 Stat. 2-5, c.6; July 19, 1867, 15 Stat. 14-16, c.30; and March 11, 1868, 15 Stat. 41, c.25) were four statutes passed duri ...
placing the South under military rule. This arrangement lasted until the military withdrawal arranged by the Compromise of 1877. In some historical periodizations, 1877 marks the beginning of the Jim Crow
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws enforcing racial segregation in the Southern United States. Other areas of the United States were affected by formal and informal policies of segregation as well, but many states outside the Sout ...
era.
The 1865–1866 Black Codes were an overt manifestation of the system of white supremacy that continued to dominate the American South.[Cohen, "Negro Involuntary Servitude in the South" (1976), pp. 31–32. "Contained in embryo in the Black Codes and gaining increasing strength in the years immediately after Reconstruction, the system of involuntary servitude remained largely hidden until 1907."] Historians have described this system as the emergent result of a wide variety of laws and practices, conducted on all levels of jurisdiction. Because legal enforcement depended on so many different local codes, which underwent less scrutiny than statewide legislation, historians still lack a complete understanding of their full scope. It is clear, however, that even under military rule, local jurisdictions were able to continue a racist pattern of law enforcement, as long as it took place under a legal regime that was superficially race-neutral.
In 1893–1909 every Southern state except Tennessee passed new vagrancy laws. These laws were more severe than those passed in 1865, and used vague terms that granted wide powers to police officers enforcing the law. An example were the so-called "Pig Laws", with harsh penalties for crimes such as stealing a farm animal. Pig Laws were solely applied to African Americans related to agricultural crimes. In wartime, Blacks might be disproportionately subjected to "work or fight" laws, which increased vagrancy penalties for those not in the military. The Supreme Court upheld racially discriminatory state laws and invalidated federal efforts to counteract them; in ''Plessy v. Ferguson
''Plessy v. Ferguson'', 163 U.S. 537 (1896), was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court ruled that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. Constitution as long as the facilities for each race were equal in qualit ...
'' (1896) it upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation and introduced the "separate but equal
Separate but equal was a legal doctrine in United States constitutional law, according to which racial segregation did not necessarily violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which nominally guaranteed "equal protec ...
" doctrine.
A general system of legitimized anti-Black violence, as exemplified by the Ku Klux Klan
The Ku Klux Klan (), commonly shortened to the KKK or the Klan, is an American white supremacist, right-wing terrorist, and hate group whose primary targets are African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and ...
, played a major part in enforcing the practical law of white supremacy. The constant threat of violence against Black people (and White people who sympathized with them) maintained a system of extralegal terror. Although this system is now well known for prohibiting Black suffrage after the Fifteenth Amendment, it also served to enforce coercive labor relations. Fear of random violence provided new support for a paternalistic
Paternalism is action that limits a person's or group's liberty or autonomy and is intended to promote their own good. Paternalism can also imply that the behavior is against or regardless of the will of a person, or also that the behavior expres ...
relationship between plantation owners and their Black workers.[Daniel, "Metamorphosis of Slavery" (1979), p. 91. "Freedmen, however, did not cooperate with the plans to reenslave them. Immediately, planters and whites in general were struck by the change in attitude among freedmen. Deference largely disappeared, respect for whites dwindled, and even the more patient whites found it difficult to work with free blacks. Paternalism no longer worked, and whites came to hate freedmen, projecting on blacks the defeat in battle, economic ruin and the occupation by Union troops. €¦Yet a kind of paternalism emerged once again during the violence of Radical Reconstruction, during the rides of the Ku Klux Klan. Planters, sizing up the situation, gave tenants on their plantations protection in exchange for regular work and a general compliance with the new order."]
Mississippi
Mississippi was the first state to pass Black Codes. Its laws served as a model for those passed by other states, beginning with South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana in 1865, and continuing with Florida, Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas at the beginning of 1866.[Stewart, ''Black Codes and Broken Windows'' (1998), pp. 2259–2260.] Intense Northern reaction against the Mississippi and South Carolina laws led some of the states that subsequently passed laws to excise overt racial discrimination; but, their laws on vagrancy, apprenticeship, and other topics were crafted to effect a similarly racist regime.[Ranney, ''In the Wake of Slavery'' (2006), p. 51. Quote: "Generally, Restoration legislatures tried to preserve as many prewar restrictions as possible while making at least a slight bow to Northern public opinion."] Even states that carefully eliminated most of the overt discrimination in their Black Codes retained laws authorizing harsher sentences for Black people.
Mississippi was the first state to legislate a new Black Code after the war, beginning with "An Act to confer Civil Rights on Freedmen". This law allowed Blacks to rent land only within cities—effectively preventing them from earning money through independent farming. It required Blacks to present, each January, written proof of employment. The law defined violation of this requirement as vagrancy, punishable by arrest—for which the arresting officer would be paid $5, to be taken from the arrestee's wages. Provisions akin to fugitive slave laws
The fugitive slave laws were laws passed by the United States Congress in 1793 and 1850 to provide for the return of enslaved people who escaped from one state into another state or territory. The idea of the fugitive slave law was derived from th ...
mandated the return of runaway workers, who would lose their wages for the year.[Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer, ''A History of the United States since the Civil War'' (1917) 1:128–129. Quote: "Negroes must make annual contracts for their labor in writing; if they should run away from their tasks, they forfeited their wages for the year. Whenever it was required of them they must present licenses (in a town from the mayor; elsewhere from a member of the board of police of the beat) citing their places of residence and authorizing them to work. Fugitives from labor were to be arrested and carried back to their employers. Five dollars a head and mileage would be allowed such negro catchers. It was made a misdemeanor, punishable with fine or imprisonment, to persuade a freedman to leave his employer, or to feed the runaway. Minors were to be apprenticed, if males until they were twenty-one, if females until eighteen years of age. Such corporal punishment as a father would administer to a child might be inflicted upon apprentices by their masters. Vagrants were to be fined heavily, and if they could not pay the sum, they were to be hired out to service until the claim was satisfied. Negroes must not carry knives or firearms unless they were licensed so to do. It was an offence, to be punished by a fine of $50 and imprisonment for thirty days, to give or sell intoxicating liquors to a negro. When negroes could not pay the fines and costs after legal proceedings, they were to be hired at public outcry by the sheriff to the lowest bidder...."] An amended version of the vagrancy law included punishments for sympathetic whites:[Novak, ''Wheel of Servitude'' (1978), p. 2–3.]
That all freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes in this State, over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, without lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling themselves with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a freed woman, free negro or mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in a sum not exceeding, in the case of a freedman, free negro, or mulatto, fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars, and imprisoned, at the discretion of the court, the free negro not exceeding ten days, and the white man not exceeding six months.
Whites could avoid the code's penalty by swearing a pauper's oath. In the case of blacks, however: "the duty of the sheriff
A sheriff is a government official, with varying duties, existing in some countries with historical ties to England where the office originated. There is an analogous, although independently developed, office in Iceland that is commonly transla ...
of the proper county to hire out said freedman, free negro or mulatto, to any person who will, for the shortest period of service, pay said fine or forfeiture and all costs." The laws also levied a special tax on blacks (between ages 18 and 60); those who did not pay could be arrested for vagrancy.
Another law allowed the state to take custody of children whose parents could or would not support them; these children would then be "apprenticed" to their former owners. Masters could discipline these apprentices with corporal punishment. They could re-capture apprentices who escaped and threaten them with prison if they resisted.[Forte, ''Spiritual Equality'' (1998), p. 600–601. "As with slaves, should the apprentice leave his master's employ, the master was authorized to pursue and recapture the youngster. If the apprentice still refused to return without just cause, he would be arrested and imprisoned."]
Other laws prevented blacks from buying liquor
Liquor (or a spirit) is an alcoholic drink produced by distillation of grains, fruits, vegetables, or sugar, that have already gone through alcoholic fermentation. Other terms for liquor include: spirit drink, distilled beverage or hard ...
and carrying weapons; punishment often involved "hiring out" the culprit's labor for no pay.
Mississippi rejected the Thirteenth Amendment on December 5, 1865.
General Oliver O. Howard, national head of the Freedmen's Bureau, declared in November 1865 that most of the Mississippi Black Code was invalid.[Forte, "Spiritual Equality" (1998), p. 603.]
South Carolina
The next state to pass Black Codes was South Carolina, which had on November 13 ratified the Thirteenth Amendment—with a qualification that Congress did not have the authority to regulate the legal status of freedmen. Newly elected governor James Lawrence Orr
James Lawrence Orr (May 12, 1822May 5, 1873) was an American diplomat and politician who served as the 22nd speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1857 to 1859. He also served as the 73rd governor of South Carolina from 186 ...
said that blacks must be "restrained from theft, idleness, vagrancy and crime, and taught the ''absolute necessity'' of strictly complying with their contracts for labor".[Novak, ''Wheel of Servitude'' (1978), p. 4.]
South Carolina's new law on "Domestic Relations of Persons of Color" established wide-ranging rules on vagrancy resembling Mississippi's. Conviction for vagrancy allowed the state to "hire out" blacks for no pay. The law also called for a special tax on blacks (all males and unmarried females), with non-paying blacks again guilty of vagrancy. The law enabled forcible apprenticeship of children of impoverished parents, or of parents who did not convey "habits of industry and honesty". The law did not include the same punishments for Whites in dealing with fugitives.
The South Carolina law created separate courts for Black people, and authorized capital punishment
Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...
for crimes including theft of cotton. It created a system of licensing and written authorizations that made it difficult for Blacks to engage in normal commerce.
The South Carolina Code clearly borrowed terms and concepts from the old slave codes, re-instituting a rating system of "full" or "fractional" farmhands and often referring to bosses as "masters".[Ranney, ''In the Wake of Slavery'' (2006), p. 46.]
Responses
A "Colored People's Convention" assembled at Zion Church in Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston is the largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina, the county seat of Charleston County, and the principal city in the Charleston–North Charleston metropolitan area. The city lies just south of the geographical midpoint o ...
, to condemn the Codes. In a memorial
A memorial is an object or place which serves as a focus for the memory or the commemoration of something, usually an influential, deceased person or a historical, tragic event. Popular forms of memorials include landmark objects or works of a ...
(petition) to Congress, the Convention expressed gratitude for emancipation and establishment of the Freedmen's Bureau, but requested (in addition to suffrage) "that the strong arm of law and order be placed alike over the entire people of this State; that life and property be secured, and the laborer as free to sell his labor as the merchant his goods."
Some Whites, meanwhile, thought the new laws did not go far enough. One planter suggested that the new laws would require paramilitary enforcement: "As for making the negroes work under the present state of affairs it seems to me a waste of time and energy ... We must have mounted Infantry that the freedmen know distinctly that they succeed the Yankees to enforce whatever regulations we can make." Edmund Rhett (son of Robert Rhett
Robert Barnwell Rhett (born Robert Barnwell Smith; December 21, 1800September 14, 1876) was an American politician who served as a deputy from South Carolina to the Provisional Confederate States Congress from 1861 to 1862, a member of the US H ...
) wrote that although South Carolina might be unable to undo abolition,
it should to the utmost extent practicable be limited, controlled, and surrounded with such safe guards, as will make the change as slight as possible both to the white man and to the negro, the planter and the workman, the capitalist and the laborer.
General Daniel Sickles
Daniel Edgar Sickles (October 20, 1819May 3, 1914) was an American politician, soldier, and diplomat.
Born to a wealthy family in New York City, Sickles was involved in a number of scandals, most notably the 1859 homicide of his wife's lover, U. ...
, head of the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina, followed Howard's lead and declared the laws invalid in December 1865.
Further legislation
Even as the legislators passed these laws, they despaired of the forthcoming response from Washington. James Hemphill said: "It will be hard to persuade the freedom shriekers that the American citizens of African descent are obtaining their rights." Orr moved to block further laws containing explicit racial discrimination. In 1866, the South Carolina code came under increasing scrutiny in the Northern press and was compared unfavorably to freedmen's laws passed in neighboring Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.
In a special session held in September 1866, the legislature passed some new laws in concession to the rights of free Blacks. Shortly after, it rejected the Fourteenth Amendment.
Louisiana
The Louisiana legislature, seeking to ensure that freedmen were "available to the agricultural interests of the state", passed similar yearly contract laws and expanded its vagrancy laws. Its vagrancy laws did not specify Black culprits, though they did provide a "good behavior" loophole subject to plausibly racist interpretation. Louisiana passed harsher fugitive worker laws and required blacks to present dismissal paperwork to new employers.
State legislation was amplified by local authorities, who ran less risk of backlash from the federal government. Opelousas, Louisiana :''Opelousas is also a common name of the flathead catfish.''
Opelousas (french: Les Opélousas; Spanish: ''Los Opeluzás'') is a small city and the parish seat of St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, United States. Interstate 49 and U.S. Route 190 were ...
, passed a notorious code which required freedpeople to have written authorization to enter the town. The code prevented freedpeople from living in the town or walking at night except under supervision of a White resident.[DuBois, ''Black Reconstruction'' (1935), p]
177
Thomas W. Conway, the Freedmen's Bureau commissioner for Louisiana, testified in 1866:[DuBois, ''Black Reconstruction'' (1935), p]
178
Some of the leading officers of the state down there—men who do much to form and control the opinions of the masses—instead of doing as they promised, and quietly submitting to the authority of the government, engaged in issuing slave codes and in promulgating them to their subordinates, ordering them to carry them into execution, and this to the knowledge of state officials of a higher character, the governor and others. ... These codes were simply the old black code of the state, with the word 'slave' expunged, and 'Negro' substituted. The most odious features of slavery were preserved in them.
Conway describes surveying the Louisiana jails and finding large numbers of Black men who had been secretly incarcerated. These included members of the Seventy-Fourth Colored Infantry who had been arrested the day after they were discharged.
The state passed a harsher version of its code in 1866, criminalizing "impudence", "swearing", and other signs of "disobedience" as determined by whites.
Florida
Of the Black Codes passed in 1866 (after the Northern reaction had become apparent), only Florida's rivaled those of Mississippi and South Carolina in severity. Florida's slaveowners seemed to hold out hope that the institution of slavery would simply be restored. Advised by the Florida governor
The governor of Florida is the head of government of the state of Florida and the commander-in-chief of the state's military forces. The governor has a duty to enforce state laws and the power to either approve or veto bills passed by the Florida ...
and attorney general
In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general.
In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
as well as by the Freedmen's Bureau that it could not constitutionally revoke Black people's right to bear arms, the Florida legislature refused to repeal this part of the codes.[Richardson, "Florida Black Codes" (1969), p. 373.]
The Florida vagrancy law allowed for punishments of up to one year of labor. Children whose parents were convicted of vagrancy could be hired out as apprentices.
These laws applied to any "person of color", which was defined as someone with at least one Negro great-grandparent, or one-eighth black ancestry.[Richardson, ''Florida Black Codes'' (1969), p. 374.] White women could not live with men of color. Colored workers could be punished for disrespecting White employers. The explicit racism in the law was supplemented by racist enforcement discretion
In law, selective enforcement occurs when government officials (such as police officers, prosecutors, or regulators) exercise discretion, which is the power to choose whether or how to punish a person who has violated the law. The biased use of ...
(and other inequalities) in the practice of law enforcement and legal systems.
Maryland
In Maryland, a fierce battle began immediately after emancipation (by the Maryland Constitution of 1864
The Maryland Constitution of 1864 was the third of the four constitutions which have governed the U.S. state of Maryland. A controversial product of the Civil War and in effect only until 1867, when the state's present constitution was adopted, ...
) over requiring apprenticeship of young black people. By 1860, 45.6% of the black population in the state was already free. Former slave owners rushed to place the children of freedpeople in multi-year apprenticeships; the Freedmen's Bureau and some others tried to stop them. The legislature stripped Baltimore Judge Hugh Lennox Bond
Hugh Lennox Bond (December 16, 1828 – October 24, 1893) was a United States circuit judge of the United States Circuit Courts for the Fourth Circuit.
Education and career
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Bond graduated from the University of the ...
of his position because he cooperated with the Bureau in this matter. Salmon Chase
Salmon () is the common name for several commercially important species of euryhaline ray-finned fish from the family Salmonidae, which are native to tributaries of the North Atlantic (genus '' Salmo'') and North Pacific (genus ''Oncorhynchu ...
, as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...
, eventually overruled the Maryland apprentice laws on the grounds of their violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (, enacted April 9, 1866, reenacted 1870) was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the Amer ...
.
North Carolina
North Carolina's Black Code specified racial differences in punishment, establishing harsher sentences for Black people convicted of rape.
Texas
The Texas Constitutional Convention met in February 1866, declined to ratify the (already effective) Thirteenth Amendment, provided that Blacks would be "protected in their rights of person and property by appropriate legislation" and guaranteed some degree of rights to testify in court. Texas modeled its laws on South Carolina's.
The legislature defined Negroes as people with at least one African great-grandparent. Negroes could choose their employer, before a deadline. After they had made a contract, they were bound to it. If they quit "without cause of permission" they would lose all of their wages.[Crouch, "All the Vile Passions" (1993), p. 24.] Workers could be fined $1 for acts of disobedience or negligence, and 25 cents per hour for missed work. The legislature also created a system of apprenticeship (with corporal punishment) and vagrancy laws.[Crouch, "All the Vile Passions" (1993), pp. 26–28.] Convict labor could be hired out or used in public works.
Negroes were not allowed to vote, hold office, sit on juries, serve in local militia, carry guns on plantations, homestead, or attend public schools. Interracial marriage was banned.[Crouch, "All the Vile Passions" (1993), p. 23. "The legislature prohibited blacks from marrying whites or testifying against them, serving on juries, holding office, voting, homesteading on the public domain, and serving in the militia, and confined public education to white children. It provisionally authorized the Board of Managers to purchase twenty-six acres of land for a ']Lunatic Asylum
The lunatic asylum (or insane asylum) was an early precursor of the modern psychiatric hospital.
The fall of the lunatic asylum and its eventual replacement by modern psychiatric hospitals explains the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry ...
' for the benefit of 'Insane Negroes', if it was deemed 'expedient' to do so. They set aside $10,000 to buy the property and make improvements." Rape sentencing laws stipulated either capital punishment, or life in prison, or a minimum sentence of five years. Even to commentators who favored the codes, this "wide latitude in punishment" seemed to imply a clear "anti-Negro bias".[Crouch, "All the Vile Passions" (1993), p. 30.]
Tennessee
Tennessee had been occupied by the Union for a long period during the war. As military governor of Tennessee
The governor of Tennessee is the head of government of the U.S. state of Tennessee. The governor is the only official in Tennessee state government who is directly elected by the voters of the entire state.
The current governor is Bill Lee, a ...
, Andrew Johnson declared a suspension of the slave code in September 1864. However, these laws were still enforced in lower courts. In 1865, Tennessee freedpeople had no legal status whatsoever, and local jurisdictions often filled the void with extremely harsh Black Codes. During that year, Blacks went from one-fiftieth to one-third of the State's prison population.
Tennessee had a particularly urgent desire to re-enter the Union's good graces and end the occupation. When the Tennessee Legislature
The Tennessee General Assembly (TNGA) is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Tennessee. It is a part-time bicameral legislature consisting of a Senate and a House of Representatives. The Speaker of the Senate carries the additional title a ...
began to debate a Black Code, it received such negative attention in the Northern press that no comprehensive Code was ever established. Instead, the State legalized Black suffrage and passed a civil rights law guaranteeing Blacks equal rights in commerce and access to the Courts.
However, Tennessee society, including its judicial system, retained the same racist attitudes as did other states. Although its legal code did not discriminate against Blacks so explicitly, its law enforcement and criminal justice systems relied more heavily on racist enforcement discretion
In law, selective enforcement occurs when government officials (such as police officers, prosecutors, or regulators) exercise discretion, which is the power to choose whether or how to punish a person who has violated the law. The biased use of ...
to create a ''de facto'' Black Code. The state already had vagrancy and apprenticeship laws which could easily be enforced in the same way as Black Codes in other states. Vagrancy laws came into much more frequent use after the war. And just as in Mississippi, Black children were often bound in apprenticeship to their former owners.
The legislature passed two laws on May 17, 1865; one to "Punish all Armed Prowlers, Guerilla, Brigand
Brigandage is the life and practice of highway robbery and plunder. It is practiced by a brigand, a person who usually lives in a gang and lives by pillage and robbery.Oxford English Dictionary second edition, 1989. "Brigand.2" first recorded us ...
s, and Highway Robbers"; the other to authorize capital punishment for thefts, burglary
Burglary, also called breaking and entering and sometimes housebreaking, is the act of entering a building or other areas without permission, with the intention of committing a criminal offence. Usually that offence is theft, robbery or murder ...
, and arson
Arson is the crime of willfully and deliberately setting fire to or charring property. Although the act of arson typically involves buildings, the term can also refer to the intentional burning of other things, such as motor vehicles, wat ...
. These laws were targeted at Blacks and enforced disproportionately against Blacks, but did not discuss race explicitly.
Tennessee law permitted Blacks to testify against Whites in 1865, but this change did not immediately take practical effect in the lower courts. Blacks could not sit on juries. Still on the books were laws specifying capital punishment for a Black man who raped a White woman.
Tennessee enacted new vagrancy and enticement laws in 1875.
Kentucky
Kentucky had established a system of leasing prison labor in 1825. This system drew a steady supply of laborers from the decisions of "negro courts", informal tribunals which included slaveowners. Free Blacks were frequently arrested and forced into labor.
Kentucky did not secede from the Union and therefore gained wide leeway from the federal government during Reconstruction. With Delaware, Kentucky did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and maintained legal slavery until it was nationally prohibited when the Amendment went into effect in December 1865. After the Thirteenth Amendment took effect, the state was obligated to rewrite its laws.
The result was a set of Black Codes passed in early 1866. These granted a set of rights: to own property, make contracts, and some other innovations. They also included new vagrancy and apprentice laws, which did not mention Blacks explicitly but were clearly directed toward them. The vagrancy law covered loitering, "rambling without a job" and "keeping a disorderly house". City jails filled up; wages dropped below pre-war rates.
The Freedmen's Bureau in Kentucky was especially weak and could not mount a significant response. The Bureau attempted to cancel a racially discriminatory apprenticeship law (which stipulated that only White children learn to read) but found itself thwarted by local authorities.
Some legislation also created informal, ''de facto'' discrimination against Blacks. A new law against hunting on Sundays, for example, prevented Black workers from hunting on their only day off.
Kentucky law prevented Blacks from testifying against Whites, a restriction which the federal government sought to remedy by providing access to federal courts through the Civil Rights Act of 1866
The Civil Rights Act of 1866 (, enacted April 9, 1866, reenacted 1870) was the first United States federal law to define citizenship and affirm that all citizens are equally protected by the law. It was mainly intended, in the wake of the Amer ...
. Kentucky challenged the constitutionality of these courts and prevailed in ''Blyew v. United States'' (1872). All contracts required the presence of a White witness. Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment did not have a great effect on Kentucky's Black Codes.
Legacy and interventions
This regime of white-dominated labor was not identified by the North as involuntary servitude until after 1900. In 1907, Attorney General
In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general or attorney-general (sometimes abbreviated AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. The plural is attorneys general.
In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have exec ...
Charles Joseph Bonaparte issued a report, ''Peonage Matters'', which found that, beyond debt peonage
Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, the per ...
, there was a widespread system of laws "considered to have been passed to force negro laborers to work".
After creating the Civil Rights Section in 1939, the Federal Department of Justice launched a wave of successful Thirteenth Amendment prosecutions against involuntary servitude in the South.
Many of the Southern vagrancy laws remained in force until the Supreme Court's ''Papachristou v. Jacksonville
''Papachristou v. Jacksonville'', 405 U.S. 156 (1972), was a United States Supreme Court case resulting in a Jacksonville vagrancy ordinance being declared unconstitutionally vague. The case was argued on December 8, 1971, and decided on February ...
'' decision in 1972. Although the laws were defended as preventing crime, the Court held that Jacksonville's vagrancy law "furnishes a convenient tool for 'harsh and discriminatory enforcement by local prosecuting officials, against particular groups deemed to merit their displeasure.'"
Even after ''Papachristou'', police activity in many parts of the United States discriminates against racial minority groups. Gary Stewart has identified contemporary gang injunction
A civil gang injunction or CGI is a type of restraining order issued by courts in the United States prohibiting gang members in particular cities from participating in certain specified activities. It is based on the legal theory that gang activ ...
s—which target young Black or Latino men who gather in public—as a conspicuous legacy of Southern Black Codes. Stewart argues that these laws maintain a system of white supremacy and reflect a system of racist prejudice, even though racism is rarely acknowledged explicitly in their creation and enforcement. Contemporary Black commentators have argued that the current disproportionate incarceration
Imprisonment is the restraint of a person's liberty, for any cause whatsoever, whether by authority of the government, or by a person acting without such authority. In the latter case it is "false imprisonment". Imprisonment does not necessari ...
of African Americans, with a concomitant rise in prison labor, is comparable (perhaps unfavorably) with the historical Black Codes.
Comparative history
The desire to recuperate the labor of officially emancipated people is common among societies (most notably in Latin America) that were built on slave labor. Vagrancy laws and peonage systems are widespread features of post-slavery societies. One theory suggests that particularly restrictive laws emerge in larger countries (compare Jamaica with the United States) where the ruling group does not occupy land at a high enough density to prevent the freed people from gaining their own. It seems that the United States was uniquely successful in maintaining involuntary servitude after legal emancipation.
Historians have also compared the end of the slavery in the United States to the formal decolonization
Decolonization or decolonisation is the undoing of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby imperial nations establish and dominate foreign territories, often overseas. Some scholars of decolonization focus especially on separatism, in ...
of Asian
Asian may refer to:
* Items from or related to the continent of Asia:
** Asian people, people in or descending from Asia
** Asian culture, the culture of the people from Asia
** Asian cuisine, food based on the style of food of the people from Asi ...
and African
African or Africans may refer to:
* Anything from or pertaining to the continent of Africa:
** People who are native to Africa, descendants of natives of Africa, or individuals who trace their ancestry to indigenous inhabitants of Africa
*** Ethn ...
nations. Like emancipation, decolonization was a landmark political change—but its significance, according to some historians, was tempered by the continuity of economic exploitation. The end of legal slavery in the United States did not seem to have major effects on the global economy or international relations. Given the pattern of economic continuity, writes economist Pieter Emmer, "the words ''emancipation'' and ''abolition'' must be regarded with the utmost suspicion."[Emmer, "The Price of Freedom" (1992), p. 24.]
See also
* 40 acres and a mule
* Apartheid in South Africa
Apartheid (, especially South African English: , ; , "aparthood") was a system of institutionalised racial segregation that existed in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) from 1948 to the early 1990s. Apartheid was ...
* Code Noir
The (, ''Black code'') was a decree passed by the French King Louis XIV in 1685 defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The decree restricted the activities of free people of color, mandated the conversion of all e ...
* Grandfather clause
A grandfather clause, also known as grandfather policy, grandfathering, or grandfathered in, is a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations while a new rule will apply to all future cases. Those exempt from t ...
* Judicial aspects of race in the United States
Legislation seeking to direct relations between racial or ethnic groups in the United States has had several historical phases, developing from the European colonization of the Americas, the triangular slave trade, and the American Indian Wars. T ...
* List of Jim Crow law examples by state
This is a list of examples of Jim Crow laws, which were state, territorial and local laws in the United States enacted between 1876 and 1965. Jim Crow laws existed throughout the United States and originated from the White Codes that were pass ...
* Oregon black exclusion laws
* Racial segregation in the United States
In the United States, racial segregation is the systematic separation of facilities and services such as Housing in the United States, housing, Healthcare in the United States, healthcare, Education in the United States, education, Employment in ...
* Redlining
In the United States, redlining is a discriminatory practice in which services (financial and otherwise) are withheld from potential customers who reside in neighborhoods classified as "hazardous" to investment; these neighborhoods have signif ...
* Republic of New Afrika
The Republic of New Afrika (RNA), founded in 1968 as the Republic of New Africa (RNA), is a black nationalist organization and black separatist movement in the United States popularized by black militant groups. The larger New Afrika movement ...
* Reverse Underground Railroad
The Reverse Underground Railroad is the name given, sardonically, to the pre-American Civil War practice of kidnapping in free states not only fugitive slaves but free blacks as well, transporting them to slave states, and selling them as sla ...
* Wage slavery
Wage slavery or slave wages refers to a person's dependence on wages (or a salary) for their livelihood, especially when wages are low, treatment and conditions are poor, and there are few chances of upward mobility.
The term is often used ...
* White backlash#United States
* History of unfree labor in the United States
The history of forced labor in the United States encompasses to all forms of unfree labor which have occurred within the present day borders of the United States through modern times. "Unfree labor" is a generic or collective term for those work ...
Notes
References
Bibliography
* Belz, Herman. ''A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen's Rights, 1861–1866''. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1976; New York: Fordham University Press, 2000.
*
*
*
*
* DuBois, W. E. B. ''Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880''. New York: Russell & Russell, 1935.
* Emmer, Pieter C. "The Price of Freedom: The Constraints of Change in Postemancipation America". In ''The Meaning of Freedom: Economics, Politics and Culture After Slavery'', ed. Frank McGlynn & Seymour Drescher
Seymour Drescher (born 1934) is an American historian and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, known for his studies on Alexis de Tocqueville and slavery and his published work ''Econocide''.
Career
Seymour Drescher has been publishin ...
. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
*
* Forte, David F.
Spiritual Equality, the Black Codes, and the Americanization of the Freedmen
. Loyola Law Review 43, 1998; pp. 569–611.
*
* Novak, Daniel A. ''The Wheel of Servitude: Black Forced Labor after Slavery''. University Press of Kentucky, 1978.
* Painter, Nell Irvin
Nell Irvin Painter (born Nell Elizabeth Irvin; August 2, 1942) is an American historian notable for her works on United States Southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University as the Edwards Professor of Ameri ...
. ''Creating Black Americans: African-American History And Its Meanings, 1619 to the Present''. Oxford University Press, 2005.
* Ranney, Joseph A. ''In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law''. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.
*
*
* Tsesis, Alexander. ''The Thirteenth Amendment and American Freedom: A Legal History.'' New York University Press, 2004.
* Williamson, Joel. ''After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877''. University of North Carolina Press, 1965.
* Wilson, Theodore Brantner. ''The Black Codes of the South''. University of Alabama Press, 1965.
* Wormser, Richard. ''The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow''. Macmillan, 2003.
Further reading
* Birnbaum, Jonathan and Taylor, Clarence, eds. (2000). ''Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle'', New York University Press
New York University Press (or NYU Press) is a university press that is part of New York University.
History
NYU Press was founded in 1916 by the then chancellor of NYU, Elmer Ellsworth Brown.
Directors
* Arthur Huntington Nason, 1916–1932 ...
* Foner, Eric. ''Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877'' (Harpercollins
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...
: 1988)
* Horton, James Oliver and Horton, Lois E. (1998). ''In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860''
* Litwack, Leon F. (1998). ''Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow'', Alfred A. Knopf
* Litwack, Leon F. (1980). '' Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery'' Pulitzer Prize
* Lowery, Charles D. and Marszalek, John F. (1992). ''Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present'' Greenwood Press
Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. (GPG), also known as ABC-Clio/Greenwood (stylized ABC-CLIO/Greenwood), is an educational and academic publisher (middle school through university level) which is today part of ABC-Clio. Established in 1967 as Gr ...
* Middleton, Stephen (1993). ''The Black Laws in the Old Northwest : A Documentary History''
* Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson (1917). A History of the United States since the Civil War, New York, Macmillan Company
*
External links
Text of laws
1865 Black Codes of Mississippi
Secondary sources
* ttp://www.civilwarhome.com/blackcodes.htm Black Codes in the Former Confederate States
Texas State Historical Association: Black Codes
by Carl H. Moneyhon
Slavery by Another Name
by Doug A. Blackmon
The Southern "Black Codes" of 1865–66
Article, Discussion Questions, and Activity from Constitutional Rights Foundation
by Roger D. Bridges (pre-1865)
{{Reconstruction Era
White supremacy in the United States
Discrimination in the United States
African-American segregation in the United States
History of African-American civil rights
Race and law in the United States
Race legislation in the United States
Repealed United States legislation
Debt bondage
Anti-black racism in the United States