Been in the Storm So Long (80 page)

To the white South, the principle seemed altogether clear and fair-minded: “Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by
our
white laws.” Although borrowing heavily from antebellum restrictions on free Negroes, as well as from northern apprenticeship laws and Freedmen’s Bureau and War Department regulations, the Black Codes were still very much a product of postwar southern thinking, both a legal expression of the lingering paternalism (to protect the ex-slave from himself) and a legislative response to immediate and pressing economic problems. While the Codes defined the freedman’s civil and legal rights, permitting him to marry, hold and sell property, and sue and be sued, the key provisions were those which defined him as an agricultural laborer, barred or circumscribed any alternative occupations, and compelled him to work. “Upon this point turns the entire question,” a South Carolina newspaper said of the principle of compulsion,
“and as that is decided, so is the safety or ruin of this country.” If the Codes did not reestablish slavery, as some northern critics charged, neither did they recognize the former slaves as free men and women, entitled to equal protection under the law. As if to underscore how little had changed, a South Carolina law defined the two parties to a labor contract as “servants” and “masters.”
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Although the laws differed from state to state, the underlying principles and the major provisions remained the same. If found without “lawful employment,” a freedman could be arrested as a common vagrant, jailed and fined; if unable to pay the fine, he would be hired out to an employer who in turn assumed the financial liability and deducted it from the laborer’s wages. The Mississippi law also defined as vagrants any blacks unable or unwilling to pay a new tax to support Negro indigents, while the Alabama code included as vagrants “any runaway, stubborn servant or child” and any laborer “who loiters away his time” or fails to comply with the terms of his employment. Several of the codes also set down the hours of labor (from sunrise to sunset), the duties, and the behavior expected of black agricultural workers. With a sliding scale of fines for violations, the Louisiana code employed the kind of language a master might have once used in his instructions to the overseer:

Rather than expedite the slave’s transition to freedom or help him to realize his aspirations, the Black Codes embodied in law the widely held assumption that he existed largely for the purpose of raising crops for a white employer. Although the ex-slave ceased to be the property of a master, he could not aspire to become his own master. No law stated the proposition quite that bluntly but the provisions breathed that spirit in ways that could hardly be misunderstood. If a freedman decided that agricultural labor was not his special calling, the law often left him with no practical alternative. To discourage those who aspired to be artisans, mechanics, or shopkeepers, or who already held such positions, the South Carolina code, for example, prohibited a black person from entering any employment except agricultural labor or domestic service unless he obtained a special license and a certification from a local judge of his “skill and fitness” and “good moral character.” This provision, of course, threatened to undermine the position of the old free Negro class which had once nearly dominated the skilled trades in places like Charleston. With unconcealed intent, the Mississippi law simply required special licenses of any black wishing to engage in “irregular or job work.” To discourage freedmen who aspired to raise their own crops, Mississippi barred them from renting
or leasing any land outside towns or cities, leaving to local authorities any restrictions they might wish to place on black ownership of real estate.

By adopting harsh vagrancy laws and restricting non-agricultural employment, the white South clearly intended to stem the much-feared drift of freedmen toward the cities and to underscore their status as landless agricultural laborers. Even as Mississippi forbade them to lease lands outside towns or cities, local ordinances there and in neighboring Louisiana made black residency within the towns or cities virtually intolerable if not impossible. The ordinance adopted in Opelousas, Louisiana, deservedly served as a model and inspiration for other communities. To enter the town, a black person needed his employer’s permission, stipulating the object of the visit and the time necessary to accomplish it; any freedman found on the streets after ten o’clock at night without a written pass or permit from his employer would be subject to arrest and imprisonment. No freedman could rent or keep a house within the town limits “under any circumstances,” or reside within the town unless employed by a white person who assumed responsibility for his conduct. To hold any public meetings or to assemble in large numbers for any reason, blacks needed the mayor’s permission, as they also did to “preach, exhort or otherwise declaim” to black congregations. Nor could they possess weapons or sell, barter, or exchange any kind of merchandise without special permits. A freedman found violating these ordinances could be punished by imprisonment, fines, and forced labor on the city streets. Virtually identical ordinances were adopted in several Louisiana towns and parishes, with St. Landry Parish adding its own brand of punishment: “confining the body of the offender within a barrel placed over his or her shoulders, in the manner practiced in the army,” for a period not to exceed twelve hours. While finding the ordinances “incompatible with freedom,” the black newspaper in New Orleans noted that freedmen could walk the streets up to ten o’clock at night—one hour later than under slavery. “This additional hour is the fruit of our victories in the field,” the editor declared; “four years of a bloody war have been fought to gain that one hour. The world certainly moves in that quarter.”
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With the adoption of the Black Codes, the place of the ex-slave in postwar southern society had been fixed in law, his mobility checked, his bargaining power sharply reduced, and his rights of appeal hedged with difficulties. Any freedman who refused to work at the prevailing wage in a particular area could be defined as a vagrant, and there was little to protect him from combinations of employers setting wages and conditions. To many in the North, the Codes smacked of the old bondage, and even some southern whites thought them ill-advised, impractical, or at least badly timed. “
We showed our hand too soon,”
a Mississippi planter conceded. “We ought to have waited till the troops were withdrawn, and our representatives admitted to Congress; then we could have had everything our own way.” Unmoved by the criticism they anticipated, the authors of the Florida code thought it “needless to attempt to satisfy the exactions of
the fanatical theorists—we have a duty to perform—the protection of our wives and children from threatened danger, and the prevention of scenes which may cost the extinction of an entire race.” The special committee preparing the Mississippi code conceded that some of the proposed legislation “may seem rigid and stringent” but only “to the sickly modern humanitarians.”
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To the former slaves, whose opinions carried little weight, the Codes clouded the entire issue of freedom and left them highly dubious of what rights if any they could exercise without fear of arrest or legal harassment. In petitioning the governor, the freedmen of Claiborne County, Mississippi, thought it necessary to ask for a clarification: “Mississippi has abolished slavery. Does she mean it or is it a policy for the present?” By barring them from leasing or renting land, the petitioners charged that the legislature had left them with no choice but to purchase land, knowing full well that “not one of us out of a thousand” could afford the price of even a quarter of an acre. If any of them deserted an employer because of cruel treatment, they could be arrested and forcibly returned to him. How could this be reconciled with their newly won freedom? “Now we are free,” they insisted, “we do not want to be hunted by negro runners and their hounds unless we are guilty of a criminal crime.” To read the daily newspapers, the petitioners asserted, was to learn only of “our faults” rather than of the many blacks who worked to enrich the very people seeking to circumscribe their liberties. Who made possible the comforts of the planter class if not hard-working black men and women?

The petitioners assured the governor of their willingness to work for anyone who treated them well and paid them adequately; they reminded him, too, of how the slaves had stood by their white families in troublesome times. Although they recognized the presence of some “good and honest” employers among the whites, such men were “not the majority” and the “good” employer could be easily intimidated and “put down as a negro spoiler.” Finally, the petitioners thought Jefferson Davis, a fellow Mississippian, should be set free, if only because “we [know] worse Masters than he was. Altho he tried hard to keep us all slaves we forgive him.”
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But even as black petitioners and conventions condemned the Black Codes, or appealed for an amelioration of the laws, few expected a receptive audience among the planters and white farmers who controlled the legislative and executive branches of the new southern governments. After all, a black editor in Charleston observed of the “Colored Code” in his state, “it expresses an average of the justice and humanity which the late slaveholders possess.” But if “the right will prevail and truth triumph in the end,”
as this editor firmly believed, most blacks came to look to the halls of Congress rather than to the state capitol for relief. If southern whites could easily dismiss the pleas of black meetings and politically powerless black leaders, they could not afford to ignore the way in which the black newspaper in Georgia chose to frame its editorial attack on the Black Codes: “Such legislation can but tend to keep the State out of the Union, retain troops in our houses and public buildings, and increase taxation to maintain a large standing army.”
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The Black Codes proved to be short-lived, largely because the South had moved precipitately, impetuously, and carelessly. Although Federal officials, both in the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Union Army, had implemented labor policies which were strikingly similar, the Codes were deemed too blatantly discriminatory and overly repressive. Not long after the Codes were adopted, Federal officials ordered many of them suspended, nearly always on the grounds that freedmen should be subject to the same regulations, penalties, punishments, and courts as whites. Several of the state legislatures, too, had second thoughts about their actions, particularly after the initial insurrection panic subsided and the labor situation improved; the legislators themselves repealed or revised some of the more obnoxious clauses, and the Codes passed by a number of states in 1866 proved less harsh.
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Despite Federal and court orders suspending their operation, the Codes were nonetheless enforced in regions where Freedmen’s Bureau officials refused to intervene and where blacks found it difficult to appeal local decisions. Since some of the new laws, moreover, theoretically applied to both races, they were permitted to stand, with local authorities deciding how and when to enforce them. The most obvious example was the vagrancy law; although largely enforced against blacks, authorities could if they chose enforce it against whites. The mayor of Aberdeen, Mississippi, rounded up hundreds of freedmen in early 1866, gave them a few hours to contract with an employer for the year, and put the others to work sweeping the city streets. The local ordinances in Louisiana “still hold good in many parishes,” the
New Orleans Tribune
charged, despite a War Department order countermanding them; however, the ordinances were no longer published in the local newspapers and thus had to be “carried on in the dark.” When dealing with blacks under contract who left their employers, both local and Federal officials could be expected to act within the spirit and provisions of the Codes. The appearance in a Mississippi newspaper of an advertisement asking for the apprehension of a runaway laborer, complete with a description and sketch of the culprit, stirred old memories. “It is positively refreshing to look at it,” one editor remarked. No less familiar, a black man in Natchez served a jail sentence for harboring and feeding an apprentice who had run away from “a most estimable lady.”
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If the Codes were dead, the sentiment which had created them was still very much alive. Whether enforced, set aside, or amended, the Black Codes had revealed how the ruling class expected to perpetuate that rule. The
setback, then, could be viewed as but temporary, a concession to expediency. If statutes proved unavailing in returning the ex-slaves to the fields and kitchens where they belonged, economic necessity and the enforcement of contracts could achieve the same goals within an ideological framework familiar and acceptable to the North. Neither during slavery days nor in the immediate postwar years, moreover, did the planter rely entirely on legislative enactments to maintain the order and discipline he deemed essential. When it came to managing blacks, experience taught him that the place to establish his authority was in the field and the kitchen, not simply in the courthouse.