The black codes were the laws, taken by southern states governments for the duration of Andrew Johnson’s. These laws were aimed to impose rigorous restraints on liberated slaves such as depriving the, with the right to vote, to sit on juries, restricting their right to testify against whites, carrying weapons in public places and working in certain jobs. The Black Codes were the reaction to the elimination of slavery and the results of the Civil War. Southern governments issued them in the 1860s.
In April 1866, President Andrew Johnson imposed veto on the Civil Rights Bill. Johnson told the governor of Missouri Thomas C. Fletcher: “This is a State for whites, and by God, as long as I am President, it shall be a government for whites.” His thoughts on racial parity was obviously stated in a letter to Benjamin B. French, the representative of public buildings: “Everyone would, and must admit, that the white race was superior to the black, and that while we ought to do our best to bring them up to our present level, that, in doing so, we should, at the same time raise our own intellectual status so that the relative position of the two races would be the same.” (Bridges, 2007).
The acceptation of the Black Codes outlined in the fact, that radical Republicans re-accepted the Civil Rights Bill and they were also able to get the Reconstruction Acts accepted in 1867 and 1868. In spite of these acts, the control of whites over Southern state governments was slowly restored when associations such as the Ku Kux Klan were capable to terror blacks not to vote in elections. (Waldrep, 1993).
The abolitionists were rather anxious for the settlement of the Blacks among whites so, some actions were taken to limit their settlement. Thus, article 13 of Indiana’s 1851 Constitution, for instance, affirmed that “No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution.” The 1848 Constitution of Illinois originated one of the strictest Black Code structures in the nation until the Civil War. The Illinois Black Code of 1853 expanded a total ban against black settlement within the state. (Stewart, 1998).
All the slave states accepted laws forbidding the marriage of whites and blacks, so-called anti-miscegenation regulations, as did several states, entailing Indiana, Illinois and Michigan. Indiana and Illinois had similar bounders with slave states. The southern people of their states had customs that shared more standards and principles with the southern states. In some states the Black Codes were either included into their state’s constitutions, lots of which were amended in the 1840s.
Some black codes may entail literacy tests, grandfather imprisonment and lots of others. (Wilson, 1996).
As one historian has stated, “Racial segregation was barely a new occurrence. Before the Civil War, when slavery was associated with the status of most blacks, no necessity was felt for constitutional measures segregating the races. The warning Black Codes, along with the segregation laws accepted by the first postwar administrations, did not endure after Reconstruction.”
References
Bridges, R. D. “The Illinois Black codes” Historical Research and Narrative. 2007. Web.
McElrath J. “The Black Codes of 1865” 2005. Web.
Smith, P. “Black Codes in the Former Confederate States” The Civil War Potpourri. 2008. Web.
Stewart, Gary. “Black Codes and Broken Windows: The Legacy of Racial Hegemony in Anti-Gang Civil Injunctions.” Yale Law Journal 107.7 (1998): 2249-2279.
Waldrep, Christopher. Night Riders: Defending Community in the Black Patch, 1890-1915. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Wilson, Francille Rusan. “Racial Consciousness and Black Scholarship: Charles H. Wesley and the Consciousness of ‘Negro Labor in the United States.” The Journal of Negro History 81.1-4 (1996): 72.