Good Morning POU! We continue looking at the vile Black Codes.
In April 1865, as the Cvil War drew to a close, President Lincoln shocked many by proposing limited suffrage for African Americans in the South. He was assassinated days later, however, and his successor Andrew Johnson would be the one to preside over the beginning of Reconstruction.
Under Johnson’s Reconstruction policies, nearly all the southern states would enact their own black codes in 1865 and 1866. While the codes granted certain freedoms to African Americans—including the right to buy and own property, marry, make contracts and testify in court (only in cases involving people of their own race)—their primary purpose was to restrict Black peoples’ labor and activity.
Some states limited the type of property that Black people could own, while virtually all the former Confederate states passed strict vagrancy and labor contract laws, as well as so-called “anti-enticement” measures designed to punish anyone who offered higher wages to a Black laborer already under contract.
In South Carolina, a law prohibited Black people from holding any occupation other than farmer or servant unless they paid an annual tax of $10 to $100. This provision hit free Black people already living in Charleston and former slave artisans especially hard. In both states, Black people were given heavy penalties for vagrancy, including forced plantation labor in some cases.
Black people who broke labor contracts were subject to arrest, beating and forced labor, and apprenticeship laws forced many minors (either orphans or those whose parents were deemed unable to support them by a judge) into unpaid labor for white planters.
Passed by a political system in which Black people effectively had no voice, the black codes were enforced by all-white police and state militia forces—often made up of Confederate veterans of the Civil War—across the South.