Good Morning POU!
Louisiana
The Louisiana legislature, seeking to ensure that freedmen were “available to the agricultural interests of the state”, passed similar yearly contract laws and expanded its vagrancy laws. Its vagrancy laws did not specify Black culprits, though they did provide a “good behavior” loophole subject to plausibly racist interpretation. Louisiana passed harsher fugitive worker laws and required blacks to present dismissal paperwork to new employers.
State legislation was amplified by local authorities, who ran less risk of backlash from the federal government. Opelousas, Louisiana, passed a notorious code which required freedpeople to have written authorization to enter the town. The code prevented freedpeople from living in the town or walking at night except under supervision of a White resident.
Thomas W. Conway, the Freedmen’s Bureau commissioner for Louisiana, testified in 1866:
Some of the leading officers of the state down there—men who do much to form and control the opinions of the masses—instead of doing as they promised, and quietly submitting to the authority of the government, engaged in issuing slave codes and in promulgating them to their subordinates, ordering them to carry them into execution, and this to the knowledge of state officials of a higher character, the governor and others. … These codes were simply the old black code of the state, with the word ‘slave’ expunged, and ‘Negro’ substituted. The most odious features of slavery were preserved in them.
Conway describes surveying the Louisiana jails and finding large numbers of Black men who had been secretly incarcerated. These included members of the Seventy-Fourth Colored Infantry who had been arrested the day after they were discharged.
The state passed a harsher version of its code in 1866, criminalizing “impudence”, “swearing”, and other signs of “disobedience” as determined by whites.
Florida
Of the Black Codes passed in 1866 (after the Northern reaction had become apparent), only Florida’s rivaled those of Mississippi and South Carolina in severity. Florida’s slaveowners seemed to hold out hope that the institution of slavery would simply be restored. Advised by the Florida governor and attorney general as well as by the Freedmen’s Bureau that it could not constitutionally revoke Black people’s right to bear arms, the Florida legislature refused to repeal this part of the codes.
The Florida vagrancy law allowed for punishments of up to one year of labor. Children whose parents were convicted of vagrancy could be hired out as apprentices.
These laws applied to any “person of color”, which was defined as someone with at least one Negro great-grandparent, or one-eighth black ancestry. White women could not live with men of color. Colored workers could be punished for disrespecting White employers. The explicit racism in the law was supplemented by racist enforcement discretion (and other inequalities) in the practice of law enforcement and legal systems.
Maryland
In Maryland, a fierce battle began immediately after emancipation (by the Maryland Constitution of 1864) over requiring apprenticeship of young black people. By 1860, 45.6% of the black population in the state was already free. Former slave owners rushed to place the children of freedpeople in multi-year apprenticeships; the Freedmen’s Bureau and some others tried to stop them. The legislature stripped Baltimore Judge Hugh Lennox Bond of his position because he cooperated with the Bureau in this matter. Salmon Chase, as Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, eventually overruled the Maryland apprentice laws on the grounds of their violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
North Carolina
North Carolina’s Black Code specified racial differences in punishment, establishing harsher sentences for Black people convicted of rape.
Texas
The Texas Constitutional Convention met in February 1866, declined to ratify the (already effective) Thirteenth Amendment, provided that Blacks would be “protected in their rights of person and property by appropriate legislation” and guaranteed some degree of rights to testify in court. Texas modeled its laws on South Carolina’s.
The legislature defined Negroes as people with at least one African great-grandparent. Negroes could choose their employer, before a deadline. After they had made a contract, they were bound to it. If they quit “without cause of permission” they would lose all of their wages. Workers could be fined $1 for acts of disobedience or negligence, and 25 cents per hour for missed work. The legislature also created a system of apprenticeship (with corporal punishment) and vagrancy laws. Convict labor could be hired out or used in public works.
Negroes were not allowed to vote, hold office, sit on juries, serve in local militia, carry guns on plantations, homestead, or attend public schools. Interracial marriage was banned. Rape sentencing laws stipulated either capital punishment, or life in prison, or a minimum sentence of five years. Even to commentators who favored the codes, this “wide latitude in punishment” seemed to imply a clear “anti-Negro bias”.
Tennessee
Tennessee had been occupied by the Union for a long period during the war. As military governor of Tennessee, Andrew Johnson declared a suspension of the slave code in September 1864. However, these laws were still enforced in lower courts. In 1865, Tennessee freedpeople had no legal status whatsoever, and local jurisdictions often filled the void with extremely harsh Black Codes. During that year, Blacks went from one-fiftieth to one-third of the State’s prison population.
Tennessee had a particularly urgent desire to re-enter the Union’s good graces and end the occupation. When the Tennessee Legislature began to debate a Black Code, it received such negative attention in the Northern press that no comprehensive Code was ever established. Instead, the State legalized Black suffrage and passed a civil rights law guaranteeing Blacks equal rights in commerce and access to the Courts.
However, Tennessee society, including its judicial system, retained the same racist attitudes as did other states. Although its legal code did not discriminate against Blacks so explicitly, its law enforcement and criminal justice systems relied more heavily on racist enforcement discretion to create a de facto Black Code. The state already had vagrancy and apprenticeship laws which could easily be enforced in the same way as Black Codes in other states. Vagrancy laws came into much more frequent use after the war. And just as in Mississippi, Black children were often bound in apprenticeship to their former owners.
The legislature passed two laws on May 17, 1865; one to “Punish all Armed Prowlers, Guerilla, Brigands, and Highway Robbers“; the other to authorize capital punishment for thefts, burglary, and arson. These laws were targeted at Blacks and enforced disproportionately against Blacks, but did not discuss race explicitly.
Tennessee law permitted Blacks to testify against Whites in 1865, but this change did not immediately take practical effect in the lower courts. Blacks could not sit on juries. Still on the books were laws specifying capital punishment for a Black man who raped a White woman.
Tennessee enacted new vagrancy and enticement laws in 1875.
Kentucky
Kentucky had established a system of leasing prison labor in 1825. This system drew a steady supply of laborers from the decisions of “negro courts”, informal tribunals which included slaveowners. Free Blacks were frequently arrested and forced into labor.
Kentucky did not secede from the Union and therefore gained wide leeway from the federal government during Reconstruction. With Delaware, Kentucky did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment and maintained legal slavery until it was nationally prohibited when the Amendment went into effect in December 1865. After the Thirteenth Amendment took effect, the state was obligated to rewrite its laws.
The result was a set of Black Codes passed in early 1866. These granted a set of rights: to own property, make contracts, and some other innovations. They also included new vagrancy and apprentice laws, which did not mention Blacks explicitly but were clearly directed toward them. The vagrancy law covered loitering, “rambling without a job” and “keeping a disorderly house”. City jails filled up; wages dropped below pre-war rates.
The Freedmen’s Bureau in Kentucky was especially weak and could not mount a significant response. The Bureau attempted to cancel a racially discriminatory apprenticeship law (which stipulated that only White children learn to read) but found itself thwarted by local authorities.
Some legislation also created informal, de facto discrimination against Blacks. A new law against hunting on Sundays, for example, prevented Black workers from hunting on their only day off.
Kentucky law prevented Blacks from testifying against Whites, a restriction which the federal government sought to remedy by providing access to federal courts through the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Kentucky challenged the constitutionality of these courts and prevailed in Blyew v. United States (1872). All contracts required the presence of a White witness. Passage of the Fourteenth Amendment did not have a great effect on Kentucky’s Black Codes.