black codes

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Black Codes were the acts of legislation enacted in the Confederate states in 1865 and 1866 to limit the freedom of recently freed blacks. Some apply the term to Southern antebellum legislation that restricted the action and movements of slaves, although such laws are more frequently referred to as slave codes. Persons using the term "black codes" to include all such laws see the codes as originating in the seventeenth century, continuing until the Civil War, and being reenacted in slightly modified form immediately after the war.

The laws passed in 1865–1866 by the several states did extend some civil and legal rights to freed persons—permitting them to acquire and own property, marry, make contracts, sue and be sued, and testify in court cases involving persons of their own color. But the main purpose of the legislation was to stabilize the black workforce by compelling African Americans to work and by limiting their economic options. The codes typically had provisions for declaring blacks to be vagrants if they were un-employed and without permanent residence. As vagrants, they were subject to being arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labor if unable to pay the fine. The codes also imposed penalties for refusing to complete a term of labor as well as for breaking an agreement to work when it was entered into voluntarily. Those who encouraged African Americans to refuse to abide by these restrictive laws were themselves subject to penalties. In like manner, black orphans could be apprenticed to work for a number of years. In many of these cases the whites to whom blacks were assigned turned out to be their former owners. The codes barred African Americans from testifying in court cases involving whites, often prohibited them from bearing firearms, and forbade intermarriage between the races. Of the states with the most restrictive legislation, Mississippi limited the types of property blacks could own, and South Carolina excluded blacks from certain businesses and from skilled trades.

Being strikingly similar to the antebellum slave codes, the black codes were, at the very least, not intended to protect the rights to which African Americans were entitled as free persons. The laws aimed to replace the social controls of slavery, which had been legally swept away by the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, and to reinstate the substance of the slave system without the legal form.

Enactment of black codes in the Southern states was a factor in the conflict within the federal government between the executive and legislative branches for control of the process of Reconstruction. More than any other single factor, it demonstrated what African Americans could expect from state governments controlled by those who had actively supported the Confederate cause. Northern reaction to the codes helped to produce Radical Reconstruction and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which temporarily removed such legislation from the books. Following Reconstruction, many of the provisions of the black codes were reenacted in the Jim Crow laws that continued in effect until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Bibliography

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Litwack, Leon F. Been In the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Wilson, Theodore B. The Black Codes of the South. Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1965.

—Henry N. Drewry/C. P.