Coming to grips with emancipation, 1865-66: the postwar black codes

• During the months after the Civil War’s close, every former Confederate state enacted new black codes.  Some states enacted harsh codes, explicitly designed to keep newly-freed blacks in a state as close to slavery as possible; others enacted milder codes.  Key features of the codes included:

• Labor contract laws which limited black workers’ right to choose their employment by preventing employers from competing for their labor once they had signed a contract, and which, in some cases, restricted black workers’ rights to object to working conditions or even leave the plantations where they worked.  On the other hand, some states provided a measure of worker protection by requiring employers to put contracts in writing and explain them to workers.

• Apprenticeship laws, which many former masters used as a tool to try to effectively re-enslave former slave children.

• Vagrancy laws, which were often used to temporarily re-enslave blacks who could not pay their debts or could not pay fines assessed for petty crimes.

• Testimonial and jury laws prohibiting blacks from testifying against whites and serving on juries.

• Criminal laws imposing harsher criminal penalties on blacks than whites.

• Miscegenation laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

• Black codes’ severity differed substantially from state to state, and some northern states also had harsh vagrancy and miscegenation laws.  The laws attracted much unfavorable attention in the North and played an important role in Congress’s decision to impose its own reconstruction program on the former Confederate states in 1867.  Many features of the codes were eliminated or softened as soon as the new reconstruction governments took power.
• On the whole, Deep South black codes were the harshest.  The chart below summarizes the key features of each code; it can be compared with similar tables for the Old South (§ __), Mountain South (§ __) and Texas (§ ___) to see how black codes differed from region to region within the South.