That Time Mississippi Reinvented Slavery With Its 'Black Codes'

Nov. 25, 1865, in labor history.

Photo by Trisha Downing on Unsplash

On November 25, 1865, Mississippi created the first of the Black Codes. Designed to re-create slavery in all but name, this signified the white South’s massive resistance to the freeing of their labor force and the lengths to which it would go to tie workers to a place under white control.

Remember, the point of slavery was labor. If anything, we don’t talk about this enough. Yes of course it was racist, but the whole reason was to have a permanent labor force. Whites would do anything to create that labor force. And they did, engaging in crimes against humanity for hundreds of years. They had no intention of letting the end of technical slavery get in the way of labor control.

The impact of slavery’s end is hard to overestimate. But the Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves immediately, and the ratification of the 13th Amendment did not take place until well after the war’s end. The federal government was woefully unprepared, both in manpower and ideas, for ensuring that the rights of ex-slaves were respected after the war. Sure, slavery might be technically dead as of April 14, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, but was the US military there to enforce freedom on the plantations? Largely, no.

The immediate months after the war were filled with violence as whites killed newly freed people in the countryside, especially as they began to flee for cities like Memphis and New Orleans. For cotton planters, this Black flight was a real threat. They prospered on owning Black labor. If they couldn’t own that labor, planters at least needed to keep it on the land to pick the cotton that might allow them to rebuild their economic base.

The Black Codes thus intended to trap Black labor in place. The plantation elite’s top goal immediately upon emancipation was to corral Black labor, whose core goal was to avoid the plantation labor system, preferably replacing it with small farms they owned. The Black Codes intended to prevent this. Building upon the slave codes regulating Black behavior, and especially Black movement, before the war, the Black Codes were the South’s statement to the North that the end of the war did not mean the end of white supremacy. Black people would have to show a written contract of employment at the start of each year, ensuring they were laboring for a white employer. At the core of the Mississippi code and copied around the South was the vagrancy provision. “Vagrancy” was a term long used in the United States to crack down on workers not doing what employers or the police wanted them to do. In this case, it meant not working for a white person. Decades later, a vagrancy charge was a great way for authorities to imprison union organizers.

Mississippi did not allow Black people to rent land for themselves. Rather, all Black people in rural areas were required to labor for a white under one-year contracts. They did not have the option to quit working for that white person. If a Black person in the countryside was found not working for a white person, the state would contract that worker out to a private landowner and receive a portion of their wages. If a Black person could not pay high taxes levied on them by the state, they would be charged with vagrancy and the same process would result. As during slavery, any white person could legally arrest any Black person.

A Fugitive Slave Act-like provision was included that made it illegal to assist a Black person from leaving their landowner, with real punishments for whites who did so. That provision also stated that Black people caught running away would lose their wages for the year. Children whose parents could not take care of them, as defined by the whites of Mississippi, would be bonded to their former owners. Other forms of Black behavior were also criminalized, such as preaching without a license or “insulting” language toward whites. Interracial marriage, it goes without saying, was banned as well.

In other words, Mississippi reinstituted slavery.

Other southern states quickly built on Mississippi’s Black Codes. South Carolina barred Black people from any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid a very steep annual tax that sought to pauperize the large free Black community in Charleston. Virginia included in its vagrancy law anyone who refused to work for the “usual and common wages given to other laborers” in order to eliminate whites competing for Black labor. Florida’s Black Code allowed whites to whip those who broke their labor contract and then be sold for a year. Texas and Louisiana mandated that women and children who could work would have to work in the fields.

Northerners responded with anger. After all, what had they just fought this war over? While at the beginning of the war, northern white people could legitimately argue the war was about restoring the union and not slavery, no one could make that argument by the end of the war, for it was so clearly about both. When word of this got out, the North, unclear what path toward Reconstruction it would take and still reeling from the death of Abraham Lincoln six months earlier and the ascendance of his successor, Andrew Johnson, was finally moved to take more decisive action against increasingly recalcitrant ex-Confederates.

Quickly after its passage, General O.O. Howard, head of the Freedman’s Bureau, declared the Black Codes invalid. Congress met just a few weeks later for the first time since the end of the war. At this Congress, the South also sent ex-Confederate leaders such as former vice president Alexander Stephens to represent them. Taken together, this led to the rise of Congressional Reconstruction and the war between Congress and Johnson over what the postwar nation wold look like. As the Southern elite did during the 15 years before the Civil War, its aggressive overreach created northern white backlash that then led to a significant commitment to Black rights. That did not really last very long, but it did ensure that as unfair as postwar labor relations would become, they would look nothing like slavery. Congressional Reconstruction would void the Black Codes and put off the violent suppression of southern Black labor for several years, opening at least the possibility of a future that provided the freed slaves dignity, although it was not to be.

In the end, it was sharecropping that would define the postwar southern agricultural labor force, not bonded Black labor. As terrible as sharecropping was, it was not slavery and was a compromise between white people who wanted to reinstitute outright bondage and freedpeople who wanted as much independence as they could get, even if in the end it wasn’t that free.

FURTHER READING:

Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877

Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War

Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South

Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household

Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870

Gerald David Jaynes, Branches without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862-1882