Black Code of Mississippi (1865)
Impact
Passage of the Black Code immediately provoked two reactions in the nation. In the South other state legislators emulated the Mississippi Black Code. Yet in the North the laws alerted Republicans in Congress to the fact that white southerners would not voluntarily embrace black liberty.
While testifying before Congress in 1865, Colonel Samuel Thomas, an official with the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, noted the persistence of such attitudes:
The whites esteem the blacks their property by natural right, and however much they may admit that the individual relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the war and the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large, and whenever opportunity serves they treat the colored people just as their profit, caprice or passion may dictate.
Taken together with President Andrew Johnson's alleged violation of laws and his...
