Laws passed by Southern states in 1865 and 1866 to restrict the freedom of formerly enslaved people and force them back into plantation labor.
The Black Codes were laws enacted by Southern legislatures in 1865 and 1866, after President Andrew Johnson allowed former Confederates to reorganize state governments. They acknowledged that slavery had ended but aimed to keep the change from slavery to freedom as small as possible. Mississippi acted first, in November 1865, with the most extreme code, and other Southern states followed.
The codes granted freedpeople a few rights, such as legal marriage and the ownership of some property, while denying many others. Black Southerners could not testify against white people, serve on juries or in state militias, vote, or take a new job without the approval of a previous employer. Mississippi required freedpeople to sign annual contracts to work on the plantations. Its vagrancy laws punished Black people for idleness, disorderly conduct, or “insulting” gestures; they could not own a gun or preach without a special license; and Black children could be bound as “apprentices” to white planters, usually their former enslavers, until they turned eighteen. The state’s penal code largely substituted the word “freedman” for “slave” and kept the old punishments.
The codes convinced many Northerners that Johnson’s lenient program was restoring slavery in all but name. Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed citizens “the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property,” then with the Fourteenth Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which placed most of the former Confederacy under military supervision until new state governments were formed. The original codes were largely set aside as Congressional Reconstruction began.
Their logic outlived them. After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southern states passed new vagrancy statutes, harsh contract-labor laws, and so-called Pig Laws that turned minor thefts into serious crimes. These laws fed the convict-lease system and helped lay the legal groundwork for Jim Crow.
See also: Reconstruction, Convict Leasing, Jim Crow, Sharecropping, Freedmen’s Bureau
Sources
- Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Mississippi History Now, “Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1865–1876.” Link
- PBS, Slavery by Another Name, “Black Codes and Pig Laws.” Link
- National Park Service, Vicksburg National Military Park, “Reconstruction and African Americans.” Link
- U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “Reconstruction and Black Political Activism.” Link
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