black codes definition us history

black codes definition us history

The Impact of Black Codes in U.S. History

1. Introduction to Black Codes

The question “What is the meaning of ‘race’ in U.S. history?” thus evolves from a study of the Black Codes. Technically, “race” signifies a category created by white people to justify institutionalized white privileges, and “whiteness” refers to the procedures that were constructed to perpetuate those privileges. “Color,” meanwhile, represents the variable that indicates a formally vetted exclusion from whiteness. To determine the meaning of the concept “race,” therefore, we need a detailed discussion of the many elements of whiteness and of the various hierarchies designed to deprive black people and usually other people of color as well. Weaseling today’s principles of democratic correctness into a serious discussion of the concept “race” misses the point of the quest for enlightenment. Close scrutiny of formal declarations of rights is essential because they serve as the best source for understanding the meaning of race. By analyzing the details of how rights were conferred on white people and then translating this understanding into a reconstruction of how those rights were withdrawn from black people and usually from other people of color, we may move closer to a comprehensive explanation of what race signifies. Thus, before proceeding to an in-depth discussion of “what race is” and “how it has evolved,” this article will detail the specifics of Black Codes.

In the history of the United States, the term Black Codes signifies a powerful legal shield for racial discrimination. Indeed, Black Codes were among the earliest formal declarations of discrimination in the New World against those of African ancestry, and they became important symbols of racism in the United States. For most European countries, the first formal pronouncements voiding the rights accorded non-Europeans occurred in the late 15th and early 16th centuries when Spain, France, Britain, and Portugal established the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For the large majority of Europeans, Black codified discriminatory laws were unnecessary, for Europeans had taken for granted that people who were black could not enjoy the same rights and privileges as people who were white. The actual need to codify discrimination by race arose in the New World when the U.S. Constitution officially recognized the humanity of those with African ancestry and thus conferred at least some of the rights of personhood upon black slaves in the United States.

2. Enactment and Purpose of Black Codes

The primary purpose of these laws was to eliminate black independence, prevent social and economic mobility, and ensure the supply of cheap labor for the Southern plantation owners. Relations of “effective and charitable patronage” between employer and employee, or “respectful and obliging deference” were to be encouraged. Independent and organized labor as well as political activity by blacks were seen as threats to white economic and sociopolitical supremacy. Trickery, physical coercion, and bribes were employed to keep the freedman working. Not surprisingly, the laws which did all these things also punished blacks and those who wanted civil rights progress for them.

With the close of the Civil War on the horizon, the Southern states, one after another, began to pass laws that restricted the freedom of their newly freed slave populations. These came to be known as “Black Codes.” When reconstruction ended and federal occupation was finally lifted from the South, these preliminary Black Codes were expanded to become “Jim Crow.” The purpose of these laws was to control, and to the greatest extent possible, confine, direct, and exploit a potentially dense population of agricultural workers. Indeed, the penalty for refusal to work was backbreaking, gang chain labor under the whip of the system of enforced servitude. The threat of lynching, supported by these specially insidious laws promising imprisonment to black persons identified as vagrants, was always present.

3. Effects and Reactions to Black Codes

The realization of the harshness of the measures taken by the South produced reactions. In fact, most of the “laws” were not statutes at all, but a collection of practices known as the Black Codes. They were enforced by southern judges, casting spells on their suddenly invisible black populations. Legal fourteenth amendment citizenship could not become conditioned, they thought, on caring whether or not blacks stayed put at the bottom of the heap, left to spend time, and penalize them for exercising any new options they found were now made available.

The Black Codes had far-reaching and debilitating effects, but they were also met with resistance from freed blacks and Northern whites who found the laws’ true intent more at odds with racial equality than they originally thought. The codes seized the most precious of personal and economic freedoms. Freed people known to have violated the labor contracts were returned to the planters. The intention of the South was clearly to restore the old labor system. Seeing a return to the antebellum world with emancipation, many Northerners were startled.

4. Abolition of Black Codes and Legacy

On March 2, 1866, Congress overturned the Black Codes in the Civil Rights Act, which declared all people born in the United States to be citizens, without regard to race, color, or previous condition. A few years later, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution would resolve the question of the citizenship rights and the. In 1867, Congress passed the Military Reconstruction Act, a law placing the former Confederate states (with the exception of Tennessee) under military occupation and subject to strict rules for readmission to the Union. Those rules included federal approval of new state constitutions, which had to comply with provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment, in order to gain readmission. These new constitutions also had to abolish slavery and Black Codes, and establish universal manhood suffrage.

In 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued a Special Field Order No. 15, thereby setting aside vast tracts of land along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida for refugee settlement by landless black families. This order allowed each family up to 40 acres. These orders were a pragmatic recognition of the two great truths of the Civil War era: of slavery, which had brought about the war, and of the vastly expanded military needs of the Union. But a scanty little being done, beyond talk. The Black Codes were much harsher than the prewar slave codes, and the response of white Northerners and African Americans to the realization that full abolition had in many respects not yet arrived played a key role in the eventual development of a new definition of American freedom.