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HISTORY Black Codes are most commonly associated with the laws adopted in the southern states after the American Civil War until the beginning of Reconstruction to regulate the freedoms of former slaves. Contrary to popular misconception though, the Black Codes did not begin in 1865 . Rather they develop over the span of half a century or more and date to the early 19th century in some northern states. Early Black Codes in the Midwest Ohio , Indiana , Illinois , Michigan , and Wisconsin entered the union as free states. In the early 19th century, however, white Negrophobia prompted a call for statutory regulations and restrictions on free blacks who resided in or moved through their territory. In several cases these restrictions amounted to an outright ban on blacks from owning property, contracting, or taking up residence in certain states. Ohio's state legislature adopted one of the first immigration laws against freedmen in 1804. The territorial legislature of Illinois followed suit in 1813 by enacting an outright prohibition against free black settlers within its borders. The Expansion of Black Codes: 1830-1860 As the Abolitionist movement gained steam and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, so did the backlash of Negrophobia among whites in the north. Indiana passed an anti- Miscegenation statute, in 1845 . In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their State Constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1840s. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution stated that "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution." The 1848 Constitution of Illinois led to one of the harshest Black Code systems in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 extended a complete prohibition against black immigration into the state. Black Codes after the Civil War After the abolition of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment To The United States Constitution many ex-slave states adopted their own versions of the Black Code systems that had developed in the north before the war. During the first year, 1865, of presidential Reconstruction , every southern state passed new Black Codes that restrict the Freedmen , who were free but not yet citizens. They gave freedmen only a limited set of second-class civil rights, and no voting rights, while pursuing a goal of re-admission to the Union. Southern plantation owners feared that they would lose their land or, if not, that blacks would not do their field work; many Southern whites feared that blacks would consider themselves their equals. Mississippi and South Carolina black codes have been described:Oberholtzer 1:128-9
The Black Codes outraged public opinion in the North because it seemed the South was creating a form of quasi-slavery to evade the results of the war. President Andrew Johnson supported the Black Codes, but the Radical Republicans who controlled Congress resisted furiously. They passed the The Fourteenth Amendment To The United States Constitution , but Johnson blocked it. After winning large majorities in the 1866 elections, the Republicans put the South under military rule, and held new elections in which the Freedmen could vote. The new governments repealed all the Black Codes, and they were never reenacted. The Fourteenth Amendment was now ratified and went into effect. SEGREGATION As one historian has noted, "Racial segregation was hardly a new phenomenon. Before the Civil War, when slavery had fixed the status of most blacks, no need was felt for statutory measures segregating the races. The restrictive Black Codes, along with the few segregation laws passed by the first postwar governments, did not survive Reconstruction," Leon F. Litwack wrote 229 in ''Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow,'' the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning history ''Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery.'' What replaced the Black Codes, Litwack wrote, "was not racial integration but an informal code of exclusion and discrimination." "If they cannot (as they never can) occupy the places of legislators, judges, teachers, &c.," a North Carolina planter explained, "they may be useful as tillers of the soil, as handicraftsmen, as servants in various situations, and be happy in their domestic and family relations... It is our Christian duty to encourage them to these ends." That, Litwack wrote in ''Been in the Storm So Long'' was putting the best face on the legislation adopted by most of the ex-Confederate states to regulate freedmen—laws that came to be known collectively as the Black codes. 366 DISTINCTION FROM JIM CROW LAWS The Black Codes of the 1860s are ''not'' the same as the Jim Crow Law s, but were enacted in 1865 directly after the Civil War ; whereas, the Jim Crow era began in 1890. SEE ALSO
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