Black Codes and Slave Codes

Abstract

The institution of chattel slavery in the United States was primarily a system of labor and containment. One of the legal strategies that Euro-American enslavers devised to control the time, energy, and mobility of enslaved people of African descent was slave codes. Enslavers began to codify these restrictions into laws in the 17th century. One of the most (in)famous of these laws, partus sequitur ventrem, or “that is which brought forth follows the womb,” defined slavery as a heritable condition from the mother. Other codes, such as prohibitions against interracial marriage, followed. As chattel slavery became more entrenched into American society and economy in the 19th century, slave codes evolved as well. Southern legislatures required that an enslaved person carry a pass that authorized travel away from the plantation. Enslaved people could not own guns, could not learn to read or sing, beat drums, or gather in groups without their enslaver’s permission. Any violations of these codes meant swift and brutal punishment to transgressors. Despite these dehumanizing decrees, enslaved people resisted their bondage in overt and subtle ways. Even free blacks in the Northern states, however, did not escape these legal entrapments. Laws called “black codes” contained similar restrictions to the slave codes that existed in the Southern states. Some “free” regions, such as Ohio and Michigan, temporarily forbade free people of color from settling in their territories. With the end of the Civil War and the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment, African Americans may have been nominally free, but state governments and local authorities in the Southern states invented ways to keep a de facto slavery system in place with the passage of black codes. Mississippi passed the first of these regulations in 1865. Vagrancy laws comprised a major component of black codes. Any unemployed African American was considered “idle” and could be charged with the “crime” of vagrancy and sentenced to a fine, jail, physical punishment, and/or forced labor. Other codes outlawed African American ownership of guns, serving on juries, and interracial relationships. In addition, Southern courts used black codes to enforce apprentice contracts that separated children from their parents. In historical scholarship, very few full-length monographs exclusively tackle the subjects of slave codes and black codes. Rather, coverage of these subjects is tied in with discussions of the experiences of enslaved life and resistance and black lives, labor, and activism during the Reconstruction period.