Black Codes in the USA

The Black Codes were laws passed on the state and local level in the United States to restrict the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans, particularly former slaves.

History

Black Codes are most commonly associated with the laws adopted in the southern states after the American Civil War until the beginning of Reconstruction to regulate the freedoms of former slaves. Contrary to popular belief, the Black Codes did not begin in 1865. Rather they developed over the span of half a century or more and date to the early 19th century in some northern states.

Early Black Codes in the Midwest

Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin entered the union as free states. In the early 19th century, however, white negrophobia prompted a call for statutory regulations and restrictions on free blacks who resided in or moved through their territory. In several cases these restrictions amounted to an outright ban on blacks from owning property, contracting, or taking up residence in certain states. Ohio's state legislature adopted one of the first immigration laws against freedmen in 1804. The territorial legislature of Illinois followed suit in 1813 by enacting an outright prohibition against free black settlers within its borders.

The Expansion of Black Codes: 1830-1860

As the abolitionist movement gained steam and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, so did the backlash of negrophobia among whites in the north. Indiana passed an anti-miscegenation statute, in 1845. In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their State Constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1840s. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution stated that "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.

Black Codes after the Civil War

After the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution many ex-slave states adopted their own versions of the Black Code systems that had developed in the north before the war. During the first year, 1865, of presidential Reconstruction, every southern state passed new Black Codes that restrict the Freedmen, who were free but not yet citizens. They gave freedmen only a limited set of second-class civil rights, and no voting rights, while pursuing a goal of re-admission to the Union. Southern plantation owners feared that they would lose their land or, if not, that blacks would not do their field work; many Southern whites feared that blacks would consider themselves their equals. Mississippi and South Carolina black codes have been described:Oberholtzer 1:128-9

"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 imprison- ment, 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. President Andrew Johnson supported the Black Codes, but the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress resisted furiously. They were never put into effect in any state. Instead Congress passed the Civil Rights law of 1866. Congress also passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, but Johnson blocked it. After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republicans put the South under military rule, and held new elections in which the Freedmen could vote. The new governments repealed all the Black Codes, and they were never reenacted. The Fourteenth Amendment was now ratified and went into effect.

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 wrote229 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.

What replaced the Black Codes, Litwack wrote, "was not racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination."

"If they cannot (as they never can) occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c.," a North Carolina planter explained, "they may be useful as tillers of the soil, as handicraftsmen, as servants in various situations, and be happy in their domestic and family relations... It is our Christian duty to encourage them to these ends." That, Litwack wrote in Been in the Storm So Long was putting the best face on the legislation adopted by most of the ex-Confederate states to regulate freedmen—laws that came to be known collectively as the Black codes. Ended officially in 1866.366

Distinction from Jim Crow laws

The Black Codes of the 1860s are not the same as the Jim Crow laws, but were enacted in 1865 directly after the Civil War; whereas, the Jim Crow era began in 1890.

Bibliography

Jonathan Birnbaum and Clarence Taylor, eds. Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle (New York University Press: 2000) ISBN 0814782159
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 (Harpercollins: 1988) ISBN 0060158514
Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (1998)
Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by (Alfred A. Knopf: 1998)
Litwack, Leon F. Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery Pulitzer Prize (1980) ISBN 0394743989
Charles D. Lowery and John F. Marszalek; Encyclopedia of African-American Civil Rights: From Emancipation to the Present Greenwood Press, 1992
Stephen Middleton. The Black Laws in the Old Northwest : A Documentary History (1993)
Theodore B. Wilson, The Black Codes of the South University of Alabama Press, 1965
Waldrep, Christopher. "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.

External links

1865 Black Codes of Mississippi Text of laws
Northern Black Codes - Were they effective? by William Arthur Carden

Notes

History of racial segregation in the United States | Politics and race | Reconstruction | African-American history | Unfree labor

Black codes | 黑人法令

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