Black Codes Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

The term Black Codes refers to a collection of laws passed to restrict the civil rights of freed slaves and other persons of African descent. These are most commonly associated with an assortment of local and state laws passed in the Southern states between 1865 and 1866 following the abolition of slavery at the end of the U.S. Civil War. The purpose of these laws was threefold. First, the laws curtailed the social, occupational, and spatial mobility of African Americans. Geographically varying by state and local jurisdiction, these laws generally denied freed slaves the right to vote, marry whites, bear arms, or assemble after sunset. Other laws proscribed areas where African Americans could purchase or rent property or prohibited them from testifying against whites in court.

Second, the Black Codes operated to reproduce slavery in a disguised form. African Americans who quit their jobs, for example, could be arrested, imprisoned, and leased out as convict labor. Likewise, African Americans could be arrested and fined for other infractions, such as curfew violations or making insulting gestures. Through unfair imprisonment and debt bondage, Southern politicians tried to replicate slavery as closely as possible.

Third, the intent of the laws was to reinforce white supremacy and symbolically reflect the inferior status of blacks in the United States. In Mississippi, for example, railroads forbade “any freedman, negro, or mulatto to ride in any first-class passenger cars, set apart, or used by and for white persons.” In short, the Black Codes ensured that African Americans “knew their place” in U.S. society.

President Andrew Johnson, being a white supremacist and supporter of states’ rights, encouraged the South in its drafting of the Black Codes. Indeed, every governor whom Johnson appointed to head the new state governments in the South opposed black suffrage and worked to curb the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. However, the Republican-dominated Congress, angered by the imposition of the Black Codes, subsequently established a military governance of the Southern states. In effect, this repealed the 1865-66 Black Codes and led to the radical Reconstruction of the South (1867-77).

The postbellum Black Codes were not unique. Indeed, these codes had as antecedents a long history of laws discriminating against African Americans that dated to the founding of the United States. Most obvious, for example, is the congressional decision in 1790 to limit citizenship to whites only. Other legislation limited occupational attainment of African Americans, as seen in the 1810 law barring persons of African descent from carrying the U.S. mail.

Many laws, however, were more local, with the intent of controlling where African Americans could live. In 1717, for example, free blacks were prohibited from residing in any town or colony in Connecticut, and an early North Carolina law required free blacks to register and to carry papers testifying to their legal status. Free blacks were also required to wear patches that read FREE. Any free black who failed to register, or was found without his or her proper paperwork, could be arrested and sold into slavery.

Laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage exhibit an even longer history. In 1662 the Virginia Assembly passed an act that black women’s children were to serve according to the condition of the mother. This ensured that children of white fathers and black slave mothers would be assigned slave status. In 1691 Virginia amended this act, specifying that any free English woman who bore a mulatto child would pay a fine of 15 pounds or be sold as a servant for 5 years; the child would be a servant until age 30. These laws were replicated in other colonies. In 1664, for example, Maryland passed a law prohibiting white women from marrying black slaves. Any woman found in violation of this act was to serve the master of the woman’s black slave husband during the lifetime of the husband. In addition, any children resulting from the marriage would themselves become slaves.

The Black Codes are not synonymous with the Jim Crow laws. Although similar in intent and practice, Jim Crowism began in 1890 as a response to the ending of radical Reconstruction. These latter laws, which built on and expanded the discriminatory practices of the Black Codes, were accompanied by informal measures of control, including lynchings, beatings, and other forms of harassment. They would continue, legally, until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Bibliography:

Franklin, John Hope and Alfred A. Moss Jr. 1994. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Woodward, C. Vann. 2001. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. Commemorative ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

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