This Day in Southern History (Black Codes Set Freedmen Back)

November 24, 1865--The guns and cannons had fallen silent seven months before at Appomattox, but Mississippi--the state whose favorite son, Jefferson Davis, had become President of the short-lived Confederacy--was determined to gain in its legislature what it could not achieve on the battlefield: permanent subjugation of African-Americans. Starting by rewriting an antebellum law related to vagrancy, the legislature attempted to relegate freedmen to a state of near-slavery over the course of the next six days, becoming the first of the defeated Confederate states to pass Black Codes that helped stymie the success of Reconstruction.

When South Carolina--even more of a hotbed of the Confederacy--followed with similar legislation, aghast Northern Congressmen took note of the racial intransigence taking hold in a region still devastated by war. Radical Republicans, increasingly concerned about the lenient Reconstruction program of President Andrew Johnson (in the image accompanying this post), felt they had no choice but to step into the breech with their own rectifying legislation, including the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866.

That reaction led other Confederate states not to repeat the mistake of Mississippi and South Carolina: specifically referring to African-Americans in the legislation. (The former state’s vagrancy law had been rewritten to cover “freedmen, free Negroes and mulattoes…without lawful employment or business.”) But these latter measures were mere fig leaves over the real intent: to keep freed blacks in as close to the places they had occupied before the war as possible.
Though this blatantly discriminatory legislation was passed in the political arena, its underlying motivation was economic--or, to be more precise, labor relations. As many as 10,000 slaveowners had simply left their plantations at the war’s conclusion, according to Columbia University historian Eric Foner’s excellent history, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

The plantation system was in a state of chaos immediately after the war, and the value of land was in free fall for a long time after that. In Mississippi itself, the value of farm land, which reached $190 million in 1860, had plummeted to $81.7 million 10 years later, according to data from the University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center.

Those landowners who, against all these odds, wanted to resume their old lives simply could not imagine a new system based on Northern capitalism in which a worker could not only keep what he earned, but could negotiate (albeit not from a position of strength) for a better wage, or simply leave his job for a better one.

Defenders of vagrancy legislation in Mississippi and the other Southern states noted that many Northern states had similar laws on their books. But Northern judges applied such laws more to petty thieves and prostitutes than to African-Americans. In contrast, Mississippi’s laws started by circumscribing the freedmen’s ability to reap the fruits of their labor, but they ended by restricting their freedom of movement, opportunities to better themselves, and even their ability to defend their lives.

Astonishingly, Mississippi required at the beginning of each year that African-American males possess papers proving that they were employed. If, by chance, they had the misfortune of being laid off later, they were judged in violation of the vagrancy statutes.

One section of Mississippi’s sweeping legislation was titled “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes.” A century later, that title would have been called Orwellian, since the legislation ended up preventing blacks from:

* serving on juries with whites;
* testifying against whites in trials;
* attending white schools; and
* bearing arms.

In particular, this last point would have devastating implications because of a subterranean movement that would shortly gain sway across the Confederacy. Exactly one month after Mississippi passed its vagrancy legislation, the original Ku Klux Klan was organized in Pulaski, Tenn., with General Nathan Bedford Forrest becoming its head.

Within five years, its all-out campaign of domestic terrorism--including, but hardly limited to, breaking up black prayer meetings, voter intimidation, and murder--became so virulent in reversing the gains made by freedmen in the New South that President Ulysses S. Grant was forced to intervene to crush the Klan. In an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News, Teachers College professor Marc Lamont Hill pointed to Southern restrictions on African-Americans’ ability to protect themselves through arms as a reason why “Strict Gun Laws Are Bad for Blacks.” (I regard this latter view as mistaken, but Hill’s point about the terror and helplessness experienced by freedmen bred by the “black codes” remains undeniably true.)

The Civil Rights Act of 1866, along with the Fourteenth Amendment, overcame the Black Codes. But the latter legal statutes and constitutional amendments enacted by the former slave states served as a marker for later Jim Crow legislation.

Aided and abetted by officials who, at best, were unsympathetic to any notion of black equality, and at worst were former high-ranking officers or elected officials in the Confederacy, the South forced the North to occupy the region for a dozen years after the war. The recent American experience in Iraq demonstrates both the resentment wrought in native populations by such a presence and the growing restlessness at home over the economic and other costs of keeping order in such regions.

Much of the North breathed a sigh of relief when federal troops were withdrawn from the old Confederacy following the controversial election of 1876. African-Americans were hardly part of this chorus. The Black Codes--and the Ku Klux Klan that followed hard on its heels--had already proven to them what the South would do when left to its own devices. For nearly another century, Southern blacks had to live with the baleful consequences that followed the federal retreat from civil-rights enforcement.