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Black Codes
6 articles on Black Codes
Black Codes and Slave Codes, Colonial
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 3598 Includes: Southern Slave Codes | Northern Regulation of Blacks | Midwestern Black Codes | BibliographyIn the colonial and early national periods most slave jurisdictions developed elaborate systems of law for the regulation of blacks. These were generally known as slave codes, although they usually applied to free blacks as well. After independence a new genre of law, known as “black codes,” developed in a number of free states. These laws were designed to limit the growth of the state's free black population and to control the black population in those states. Ohio, which became a state in 1803, was the first to develop these laws. Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1819) adopted similar statutes. In the seventeenth century the colonies regulated slaves in a rather haphazard and piecemeal way. The British settlers in North America had little or no experience with slavery in their home country, and thus slavery ...
Read full articleBlack Codes in Latin America
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 3353 Includes: French Code Noir, Versailles, 1685 | French Code For Louisiana, 1724 | Códigos Negros Españoles (Spanish Black Codes) | First Code: Santo Domingo, 1768 | Second Code: Louisiana, 1769 | Third Code: Código Negro Carolino, Santo Domingo, 1784 | Real Cédula: Instructions On Slaves, Aranjuez, 1789 | Reglamento: Puerto Rico, 1826 | Reglamento: Havana, Cuba, 1842Comprehensive and methodically organized set of seventeenth-century French and late-eighteenth-century Spanish colonial laws that sought to impose a system of social, religious, and property relations on African slaves and the European and Creole population. The Black Codes comprise an elaborate set of principles, rules, and procedures that were designed to protect plantation economies and prevent slaves from running away. But because they conflicted with the slaveholders' actual interests and practices—the codes specified minimal standards for slaves' food and clothing, restrictions on punishments, and means of achieving manumission—they were rarely implemented. Nevertheless, the codes give insight into the working conditions, economic interests, and social practices of the French Caribbean and Spanish American slave societies they addressed. These laws contrast with those relating to slavery in the Portuguese colony of ...
Read full articleBlack Codes in the United States
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 635Legal statutes that curtailed the rights of African Americans during the early years of Reconstruction in the United States. The Black Codes were instituted by Southern legislative bodies in 1865 and 1866 in response to the emancipation of the 4 million former slaves in the Southern states during and after the American Civil War (1861–1865). The Black Codes recognized the new status of African Americans as freedpeople and offered them some of the basic rights of citizenship. However, the codes also defined the freedpeople as legally subordinate to whites and attempted to manage their labor in a way that would cause minimal disruption to the labor system instituted under slavery.Faced with a rapidly transformed political and economic structure in the postbellum South, Mississippi and South Carolina began passing laws in ...
Read full articleSpanish Black Codes
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 11See Black Codes in Latin America. ...
Read full articleBlack Codes
Source: The Oxford Companion to American Law
Word Count: 595Months after the end of the Civil War, Mississippi, followed by other southern states, began passing laws designed to control newly freed slaves through the legal system. Under slavery, whites had disciplined blacks primarily outside the law, through extralegal whippings administered by slave owners and their overseers. After emancipation, panicky whites feared that the end of plantation slavery would unleash blacks’ alleged criminality. White men feared for the safety of their wives and daughters and sought protection for their property.While some white southerners thought African Americans were best controlled by vigilantes, others proposed using courts and the law. On 22 November 1865, the Mississippi legislature passed a law directing civil officers to hire out orphaned minor “freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes.” This ...
Read full articleBlack Codes (1865)
Word Count: 4355Even in defeat, the states of the former Confederacy were not so willing to go gently into the new, post-slavery world. Between 1865 and 1908 so-called Black Codes began to appear in the law books of southern states—these were statutes designed to regulate the freedom, employment, and voting rights of recently freed slaves. Some codes forced blacks to seek the dispensation of a judge in the event they wanted to find work outside the realm of what whites considered proper and fitting (mostly the agricultural and domestic duties that whites commonly associated with black labor); others prevented blacks from entering certain towns without a permission slip from a white employer; still others prevented blacks from sitting on juries or from offering testimony in court against whites. ...
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