Black Code of Mississippi

Context

In April 1865, after four years of fighting and deprivation, the Civil War ended. The cessation of fighting, however, did not firmly settle the end of their social system in white southerners' minds. The lack of commitment to Black freedom in Washington, D.C., and among white southerners meant that former slaves could not easily acquire citizenship. By the conclusion of 1865, Mississippi, abetted by the U.S. president, offered firm evidence that white southerners, while reluctantly granting the abolition of slavery, refused to grant African Americans equality before the law.

An assassin took the life of President Abraham Lincoln within days of the war's end. Lincoln's generous plan for ensuring the return of the southern states to the Union fell into the hands of his successor, Andrew Johnson. The new president, a native of east Tennessee, significantly modified Lincoln's plan for Reconstruction by adding provisions intended to punish the elite planters of the South, whom he blamed for the secession crisis and the Civil War. In addition to depriving wealthy southerners and certain former Confederates of the right to citizenship, Johnson insisted that before southern states reenter the Union they repeal their secession ordinances and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which ended slavery.

Johnson's plan for Reconstruction, however, was ultimately undemanding. Even though he wished to punish certain Confederate officials and officers as well as wealthy planters, he refused to require that southern states embrace liberal notions of African American citizenship. In an August 1865 letter to Mississippi's provisional governor, William Sharkey, Johnson encouraged him to lead the state constitutional convention, which was meeting at the time, to grant the right to vote only to individuals who could read and write and to owners of property valued at a minimum of $250. Since few, if any, former slaves or African Americans living in Mississippi owned taxable property (real estate) of any sort and few could read and write, Johnson's vision of voting rights in the post-Emancipation era did not include extension of suffrage to more than a handful of Blacks. Regarding suffrage, the 1865 constitutional convention chose to replicate the Constitution of 1832; it limited the right to vote to white males over the age of twenty-one.

Two other matters that the president demanded be addressed, the secession ordinance and the abolition of slavery, occupied the 1865 convention delegates. After much wrangling, the convention declared the ordinance of session “null and of no binding force” (Journal of the Proceedings and Debates in the Constitutional Convention of the State of Mississippi, August, 1865, p. 176). Convention delegates rejected other language that accomplished the same task, lest signers of the 1861 ordinance find themselves subject to prosecution as traitors. Delegates debated vigorously even the abolition of slavery. Foolishly hoping that the federal government might offer former slave owners compensation for the loss of their human property, the convention eventually declared that the state ended the institution of slavery not voluntarily but under duress. Albert T. Morgan, a white northerner who went south during Reconstruction, rightly argued that through such language the delegates intended that their heirs know that “slavery had not been destroyed” (Morgan, pp. 204–205). Former slaves viewed the 1865 constitution in a similar manner. A group of former bondsmen meeting at Vicksburg predicted that soon the state of Mississippi would try to enslave Blacks again or force them from the state.

At the conclusion of the constitutional convention, delegates filed a report with the newly elected state legislature. The report called for the body to withhold from former slaves “some unbridled privileges for the present.” According to the report, “the wayward and vicious, idle and dishonest, the lawless and reckless, the wicked and improvident, the vagabond and meddler must be smarted, governed, reformed and guided by higher instincts, minds and morals higher and holier than theirs.” Benjamin Grubb Humphreys, who was elected governor after the convention, embraced the convention report when he told the first postwar legislature: “The purity and progress of both races require that caste must be maintained” (Bond, pp. 158–159). Perhaps not surprisingly, the first Mississippi legislature to convene after the Civil War embraced the Black Code.