Black Codes in the United States
Legal statutes that curtailed the rights of African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction in the United States.The Black Codes were instituted by Southern legislative bodies in 1865 and 1866 in response to the emancipation of the 4 million former slaves in the Southern states during and after the
American Civil War (1861–1865). The Black Codes recognized the new status of African Americans as freedpeople and offered them some of the basic rights of citizenship. However, the codes also defined the freedpeople as legally subordinate to whites and attempted to manage their labor in a way that would cause minimal disruption to the labor system instituted under slavery.
Faced with a rapidly transformed political and economic structure in the postbellum South, Mississippi and South Carolina began passing laws in 1865 to limit the freedom of African Americans. New vagrancy laws placed blacks in jeopardy of imprisonment or forced labor if they could not prove they were employed or self-supporting. Often the result was that free men and women returned to work for their former slave owners or on nearby plantations. The termination of a contract was made illegal for “any freedman, free Negro, or mulatto.” In order to restrict the movement and resettlement of former slaves, laws forbade blacks to own or rent farmland.
The codes did allow the freedpeople a number of basic legal rights that had not been granted under slavery. The rights to marry each other, to sue, to own minimal property, and to enter into contracts were written in the codes. Still, the central purpose of the Black Codes was the maintenance of a white-dominated hierarchy after the Civil War.
In 1865 Alabama and Louisiana joined Mississippi and South Carolina in the creation of laws that attempted to replicate the racial control of slavery and to harness black labor for the benefit of white landowners. By 1866 all the states of the former Confederacy, except North Carolina, had enacted laws that echoed the earlier Slave Codes. These Southern states passed
laws that permitted the imprisonment or hiring out of vagrants; a vagrant was defined as a black person who was unemployed or who possessed no contract with a white employer. Further, children who were orphans or whose parents were impoverished were turned over to the state and forced into apprenticeships with white businessmen. Statutes requiring African American skilled laborers and artisans to pay exorbitant licensing fees made it rare for a freedperson to hold any position other than that of a wage laborer.
An important aspect of the Black Codes was their unequal system of punishment. The codes sanctioned the whipping of black workers by white employers, and a minor offense such as stealing food could bring physical brutality and forced servitude. Blacks found that “unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the day or nighttime” would make them subject to immediate imprisonment.
The Black Codes aroused objections from African Americans, Northern Republicans, and even some Southern whites who recognized that such unconcealed attempts to reassert racial control would cause the federal government to continue to intervene in Southern affairs. The fears of those Southerners were well-founded. In the North, the outrage over the codes' more brazen provisions helped solidify opposition to President Andrew Johnson's lenient approach to the former Confederate states and helped bring on the stricter period of Radical Reconstruction in 1867. Officials of the occupying federal forces suspended some of the codes as discriminatory against the freedpeople, and many state legislatures repealed or amended the more objectionable parts of the codes.
See also
Reconstruction.
processed xml
|
source xml
Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
Print
Email
Cite
){kind=link}