![]() The defining feature of the Black Codes was broad vagrancy law, which allowed local authorities to arrest freedpeople for minor infractions and commit them to involuntary labor. ![]() Although freedmen had been emancipated, their lives were greatly restricted by the Black Codes. They were particularly concerned with controlling movement and labor of freedmen, as slavery had been replaced by a free labor system. ) Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Democrats trying to maintain political dominance and suppress the freedmen, newly emancipated African-Americans. (The name "Black Codes" was given by "negro leaders and the Republican organs", according to historian John S. In the first two years after the Civil War, white Southern Democratic legislatures passed Black Codes modeled after the earlier slave codes. Some of the Northern states, those which had them, repealed such laws around the same time that the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished by constitutional amendment. They were denied equal political rights, including the right to vote, the right to attend public schools, and the right to equal treatment under the law. The purpose of these laws was to preserve slavery in slave societies.īefore the war, Northern states that had prohibited slavery also enacted laws similar to the slave codes and the later Black Codes: Connecticut, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and New York enacted laws to discourage free blacks from residing in those states. ![]() Restrictions included prohibiting them from voting (North Carolina had allowed this before 1831), bearing arms, gathering in groups for worship, and learning to read and write. In the South, these were generally included in " slave codes" the goal was to suppress the influence of free blacks (particularly after slave rebellions) because of their potential influence on slaves. Since the colonial period, colonies and states had passed laws that discriminated against free Blacks. The best known of these laws were passed by Southern states in 18, after the Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans' freedom, and in order to compel them to work for either low or no wages. states that codified such laws in everyday practice. In 1832, James Kent wrote that "in most of the United States, there is a distinction in respect to political privileges, between free white persons and free colored persons of African blood and in no part of the country do the latter, in point of fact, participate equally with the whites, in the exercise of civil and political rights." Although Black Codes existed before the Civil War and although many Northern states had them, it was the Democrat-led Southern U.S. The Black Codes, sometimes called the Black Laws, were laws which governed the conduct of African Americans (both free and freed black people).
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