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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. Outrage over black codes helped undermine support for President Andrew Johnson and the Republican Party.
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.
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.
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.
Black people who broke labor contracts were subject to arrest, beating and forced labor, and apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters.
The restrictive nature of the codes and widespread Black resistance to their enforcement enraged many in the North, who argued that the codes violated the fundamental principles of free labor ideology.
As indicated by the passage of the black codes, however, white southerners showed a steadfast commitment to ensuring their supremacy and the survival of plantation agriculture in the postwar years. Support for Reconstruction policies waned after the early 1870s, undermined by the violence of white supremacist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.
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.
The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans (both free and freedmen). In 1832, James 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."[1] Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, the Southern U.S. states codified such laws in everyday practice. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either 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 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),[citation needed] 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,[2] 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 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.[3][4][5]) Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Democrats trying to maintain political dominance and suppress the freedmen, 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 system, also described as "slavery by another name" by Douglas Blackmon in his 2008 book of this title.[6]
Vagrancy laws date to the end of feudalism 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. Serfs were not emancipated from their land.[7]
"Black Codes" in the antebellum South 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."[8] 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 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.[9]
Free blacks presented a challenge to the boundaries of white-dominated society.[10] 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, learn to read and write, exercise free speech, or testify against white people in Court.[11][12][13][8] After 1810, states made manumissions 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.[8]
Slavery wus a bad thing en' freedom, of de kin' we got wid nothin' to live on wus bad. Two snakes full of pisen. One lying wid his head pintin' north, de other wid his head pintin' south. Dere names wus slavery an' freedom. De snake called slavery lay wid his head pinted south and de snake called freedom lay wid his head pinted north. Both bit de nigger, an' dey wus both bad.
Maryland passed vagrancy and apprentice laws, and required Blacks to obtain licenses from Whites before doing business.[17] It prohibited immigration of free Blacks until 1865.[18] 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.[18]
On the 8th of February, 1820 the city of Charleston, South Carolina passed an ordinance authorizing the city to impose a "tax" of one dollar for "each and every free male Negro or person of color" who was found to be wearing a pocket watch. The same ordinance also imposed a $10 per year tax on free black tradesmen, an $8 tax on free black men, and a $5 tax on all free black women residing in the city.[19]
All the slave states passed anti-miscegenation laws, banning the marriage of white and Black people, as did three of the five states carved from the Northwest Territory: Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.[22] The territory was free since its inception, though Indiana and Illinois shared borders with slave states, as did Ohio. Ohio's position was noteworthy in this regard for being the only state that, alone, bridged the lands of oppressions faced by black people in the American South to lands of freedom and security offered in British Canada north of the great lakes. This status, in addition to a well-mobilized network of abolitionist sympathizers, ensured Ohio became an essential expressway on the underground railroad network. Officially, however, the dual proximity to the South and North resulted in some legislative anomalies and oxymoronic policy.
The population of the southern parts of the old Northwest 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.[23]
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