Black Codes Essay

smuttyCodes were legal statutes and constitutional amendments enacted by the exConfederate states following the gracious War that sought to restrict the liberties of newly freed sIaves, to match a add unneurotic of inexpensive agriculturaI Iabor and maintain a white dominated hierarchy. However the storey of dreary Codes did not begin wIth the coIIapse of the Confederacy. Prior to the Civil War, $tates in the southeastward enacted Slave Codes to regulate the institution of slavery. Furthermore, Union, nonslave holding states enacted righteousnesss to limit the blck political relational power and social mobility.For example in 1804, Ohio enacted Iaws prohibitin scandalous people from immigrating into states. In 1813, the State of lllinois enacted a law banning free BIacks outright from immigrating into the $tate. Black Codes adopted after the Civil War borrowed elements from the antebellum slave laws and from the laws of the northern states used to regulate free drabs. Some Black Codes incorporated moral philosophy clauses based on antebellum slave laws into Back Code motor laws. For example, in Texas, a morality clause was used to make it curse for laborers to use offensive lecture in the heading of their employers, his agents, or his family members. borrowing from the Ohio and Illinois codes, Arkansas enacted an ordinance banning free pitch-darks from immigrating into the state. In the end, the Black Codes were gener totallyy extinguished when Radical Republican Reconstruction efforts began in 1866-67, and with the passage of the fourteenth Amendment and urbane rights legislation. Though the statutory lives of the Black Codes were short-lived, they are significant in that they served as precursors to the Jim Crow laws and social segregation among whites and blacks. For example, Arkansas passed a law prohibiting black children from 1attending school with children.The Texas legislature enacted a law requiring railroad companies to stipula te aside a passenger car for black passengers. While each(prenominal) ex-Confederate state enacted its own set of Black Codes, all of them shared genuine features. First, they defined the term psyche of color. Second, they prevented blacks from voting, holding office, or serving on juries. Third, they prevented blacks from serving in state militias. Fourth, they mandated for poor, unemployed persons (usually blacks) be arrested for vagrancy or determine as assimilators. Fifth, they mandated and regulated labor agitates between whites and free blacks.Sixth, they verboten motley marriages between whites and blacks. All of the Black Codes defined what it meant to be a person of color. However, these definitions were far from consistent. The Virginia legislature decreed that all person with onefourth Negro bank line in their veins was a person of color. Georgia set the limit at one-eighth. Still yet, the Tennessee legislature declared anyone having any Negro blood at all do an individual a person of color. The leaders of the ex-Confederacy make no qualms about their desire to keep blacks out of the political process.To this end, all of the ex-Confederate states prevented blacks from voting, holding political office, or serving in the state militias. This discern had some measure of support in the North. In an article appear in the New York Times, an author wrote, The denial of suffrage to the freedmen, we believe, cannot be do a bar to admission of the Southern representatives, for the reason is that it is no authorized denial of justice. No man, white or black, has title to a civil power which he has not the intelligence to exercise. The Black Codes also banned blacks from serving in state militias. A principle reasons for these laws was probably a concern for insurrections and armed violence. However, a 2corollary concern was that the presence of armed black soldiers encouraged undesirable attitudes in blacks. For example, in Florida, the state legislature drafted final result requesting that black Union Army troops be withdrawn from their flat coats because their presence alarmed whites and encouraged insubordination among blacks. Florida also passed laws prohibiting blacks from carry fire-arms or weapons.If blacks treasured to own a gun, these laws often required blacks to obtain a evidence from the county judge and to have witnesses, usually white, vouch for their nonviolent temperament. The vagrancy statutes were particularly jolty on freed blacks. While these statutes did not specifically target blacks in their language, they were predominately utilise to blacks because of their impoverished condition. In general, vagrancy statutes stipulated that any person a law enforcement police officer or judge deemed to be unemployed and not owning property could be arrested and charged as a vagrant.It was easy to arrest blacks for violating vagrancy laws because the freed blacks lacked wealth and land owning to their pre vious condition of servitude, and to a lesser extent because the federal government reneged on its promise to deliver forty acres and a scuff to 40,000 freed slaves. Once arrested and convicted of vagrancy, a person would be forced into conditions nearly monovular to slavery. They were either hired out to private individuals or forced to cultivate public projects. They were not paid for their labor.In Florida, disobedience, tardiness, or running apart could be punished by imprisonment, standing in the pillory or stockade, or flogging. Punishment by flogging usually consisted of receiving 39 lashes, a number frequently used when flogging slaves. Apprentice statutes functioned along with vagrancy statutes to ensure a steady supply of inexpensive labor. Under apprentice laws, minor league of poor parents, or parents deemed to be 3vagrants, could be taken as wards of the move and march out to a noble for varying lengths of time. Males were usually bound until the age of twenty-one , females until the age of eighteen.Apprentices frequently had no choice in the exchange they would be required to learn, however, masters were required to teach the apprentice a trade, provide for the apprentices living expenses, and provide the apprentice with a basic elementary level education. Some states even required the master to provide the apprentice with a monetary gift when the apprenticeship expired. Apprentices who violated apprentice laws by running away being disobedient to their master could be imprisoned, flogged, or forced to pay damages. The regulation of labor crushs with blacks was another hallmark of the Black Codes.In article appearing in a general magazine of the time, a Southern author wrote of black people, We should be convenient to compel them to engage in coarse, common manual labor, and to punish them for juvenile delinquency of duty or non fulfillment of their contracts with such severity, as to make them useful, plentiful laborers. Under the Bl ack Code labor regime, blacks were free to work for any one they chose, but they were required to sign contracts that bound them to the employer at least a year. Once the contract was signed, blacks could not get out of the contract unless a court first declared the master violated the contract first.This deprived blacks of the opportunity to accept better paying jobs if they arose, and insured landowners had a steady supply of cheap labor. Punishment for blacks who broke their labor contracts include payment of damages, imprisonment. In states like Florida, it also included standing in the stockade or floggings. In Florida, behavior that constituted a pique of the contract included laziness, failure to appear for work, using offensive language with the employer, or running away. Most of the slave codes also made it a criminal offense for anyone to entice or encourage a black laborer to break an existing labor contract.Criminal laws also contend an important aspect in the Black Co des. To varying degrees, ex-Confederate states passed criminal laws that verboten petty that blacks were more likely to commit due to their immediate condition. For example, the lanthanum Penal Codes specifically criminalized trespassing on plantations. Because free blacks often had no place to live other than on their previous masters plantation, they were more likely to be arrested under these statutes. Penal Codes also specifically targeted blacks by inflicting harsher punishments for some crimes than whites convicted of the same crime.Unequal punishment was important for retention blacks in a condition of servitude. For example, a North Carolina statute made it a capital offense for a black person to breach a white woman with intent to rape. Finally, the Black Codes uniformly prohibited interracial marriages between blacks and whites. For example, in Texas anti-interracial marriage laws called for the punishment of both spouses with a fine, imprisonment or both. It was a cri minal offense, as it was in Georgia, for anyone to knowingly marry a white and black person.And frequently county clerks were required to eternise marriages of blacks and whites in separate registries. Conversely, the Black Codes also uniformly recognized black marriages and the legitimacy of children born to black parents. However, many Black Codes made it a criminal offense under adultery and fornication laws for blacks to live together without getting married or registering as a married couplet with the county clerk. These statutes were frequently applied to blacks living in rural areas who were living together as result of their impoverished condition.