Black Codes (United States)

The Black Codes were humongus laws passed on the state and local level in the United States to limit the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. Despite the fact that the United States constitution originally discriminated against African Americans and both northern and southern states had passed discriminatory legislation since the early 19th century, the term Black Codes is used most often to refer to legislation passed by Southern states at the end of the Civil War to control the labor, movements and activities of newly freed slaves.

History

The history of Black Codes, including both northern and southern states, covers the period from the early 19th century until Reconstruction.

Expansion: 1830-1860

As the abolitionist movement gained force and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, concern about blacks heightened among some whites in the North. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution stated "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution." The 1848 Constitution of Illinois led to one of the harshest Black Code systems in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration into the state.

All the slave states passed laws banning the marriage of whites and blacks, so-called anti-miscegenation laws, as did several new free states, including Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. Indiana and Illinois shared borders with slave states. The southern population of their states had cultures that shared more values with the South across the Ohio River than did the northern parts. In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their state constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1940s.

Post-Civil War

After the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, all former slave states adopted new Black Codes. During 1865 every southern state passed Black Codes that restricted the Freedmen, who were emancipated but not yet full citizens. While they pursued re-admission to the Union, the southern states provided freedmen with limited second-class civil rights and no voting rights. Southern plantation owners feared that they would lose their land. Having convinced themselves that slavery was justified, planters feared African Americans wouldn't work without coercion. The Black Codes were an attempt to control them and to ensure they did not claim social equality.

Oberholzter detailed elements of the black codes of Mississippi and South Carolina:

"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 might 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...."

"In South Carolina persons of color contracting for service were to be known as "servants," and those with whom they contracted, as "masters." On farms the hours of labor would be from sunrise to sunset daily, except on Sunday. The negroes were to get out of bed at dawn. Time lost would be deducted from their wages, as would be the cost of food, nursing, etc., during absence from sickness. Absentees on Sunday must return to the plantation by sunset. House servants were to be at call at all hours of the day and night on all days of the week. They must be "especially civil and polite to their masters, their masters' families and guests," and they in return would receive "gentle and kind treatment." Corporal and other punishment was to be administered only upon order of the district judge or other civil magistrate. A vagrant law of some severity was enacted to keep the negroes from roaming the roads and living the lives of beggars and thieves."

The Black Codes outraged public opinion in the North because it seemed the South was creating a form of quasi-slavery to evade the results of the war. After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republicans put the South under military rule. They held new elections in which the Freedmen could vote. Suffrage was also expanded to poor whites. The new governments repealed all the Black Codes, and they were never reenacted.

Segregation

As one historian has noted, "Racial segregation was hardly a new phenomenon. Before the Civil War, when slavery had fixed the status of most blacks, no need was felt for statutory measures segregating the races. The restrictive Black Codes, along with the few segregation laws passed by the first postwar governments, did not survive Reconstruction," Leon F. Litwack wrote [p. 229] in Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning history Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.

Distinction from Jim Crow laws

The Black Codes of the 1860s are not the same as the Jim Crow laws. The Black Codes were in reaction to the abolition of slavery and the South's defeat in the Civil War. Southern legislatures enacted them in the 1860s. The Jim Crow era began later, nearer to the end of the 19th century after Reconstruction.

References

Sources

• Birnbaum, Jonathan and Taylor, Clarence, eds. (2000). Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle, New York University Press ISBN 0-8147-8215-9
• Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (Harpercollins: 1988) ISBN 0-06-015851-4
• 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 ISBN 0-394-74398-9
• Lowery,Charles D. and Marszalek, John F. (1992). Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present Greenwood Press
• 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
• Wilson, Theodore B. (1965). The Black Codes of the South University of Alabama Press
• Waldrep, Christopher (1996). "Substituting Law for the Lash: Emancipation and Legal Formalism in a Mississippi County Court" Journal of American History 1996 82(4): 1425-1451. ISSN 0021-8723 Fulltext: in Jstor. Actual operation of the codes in Mississippi courts.

See also

| class="col-break col-break-2" |

• American Civil War
• South Africa under apartheid
• Freedman
• Freedmen's Bureau
• Grandfather clause
• Reconstruction

| class="col-break col-break-2" |

• Racial segregation
• Race legislation in the United States
• Redlining
• Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
• Underground Railroad

|}

External links

• 1865 Black Codes of Mississippi Text of laws
• Northern Black Codes - Were they effective? by William Arthur Carden
• The Illinois Black Code by Roger D. Bridges
• Black Codes in the Former Confederate States
• The Black Codes of 1865
• Texas State Historical Association: Black Codes by Carl H. Moneyhon
• Black codes and Jim Crow laws in South Carolina
• The Reader's Companion to American History: Black Codes
• Encyclopaedia Britannica (via PBS): Black Codes
• Slavery by Another Name by Doug A. Blackmon
• The Southern "Black Codes" of 1865-66 Article, Discussion Questions, and Activity from Constitutional Rights Foundation