Black Code of Mississippi

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The document consists of three parts: “An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes”; “An Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice, as Relates to Freedmen, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes”; and “An Act to Amend the Vagrant Laws of the State.”

An Act to Confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for Other Purposes

In this first section of the Black Code, African Americans are granted the right to buy and sell property other than real estate. By denying Blacks the ability to own real property, the legislature attempts to ensure that they would remain dependent laborers. Indeed, Section 1 of the law permits Blacks to rent property in cities and towns only if local government expressly allows them to. In this way, the legislature attempts to keep Blacks in the country, close to agricultural labor, the only labor whites assume that Blacks can perform.

Further attempts to control the labor of Blacks appear in Sections 5 through 9. In those sections, African Americans are required to have a legally validated address and employment at the start of each new year, typically the same time that labor contracts are signed. Although Blacks receive certain protections in the execution of contracts, they are not permitted to break their contracts with “good cause.” Doing so would result in prosecution in the courts. The sections of the law addressing those who breach contracts resemble the sections of the separate act that regulated relations between masters and apprentices. By subjecting individuals who break their contracts to similar treatment and punishment as runaway apprentices, the legislature evinces its belief that African Americans could not be trusted to perform their labor.

The act also regulates the social rights of African Americans. While slaves never had the legal right to marry, the Black Code recognizes that they can marry as long as they marry someone of their own race. The code also allows former slaves who have lived with someone in a spousal relationship to record their relationship as married in the county records. To further clarify who classifies as Black and is thus prohibited from marrying a white person, the law defines a mulatto as someone with a single “negro” great-grandparent.

Section 4 of the law says that former slaves and others of African descent can testify against other African Americans. In criminal proceedings, however, they can testify against a white person accused of committing a crime against a Black person. The restriction on Blacks' testimony in the court reflects restrictions that appear in the antebellum slave code.

An Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice, as Relates to Freedmen, Free Negroes, and Mulattoes

This section of the Mississippi Black Code may be the best known, as it provides ample evidence that lawmakers are reluctant to wholly abolish slavery. The first section of the law requires that officers of county courts twice annually file a report listing the names of African Americans under the age of eighteen who are orphans or whose parents cannot provide proper care for them. According to the law, juveniles who are listed on the report would be then apprenticed to a “competent and suitable person.” Not only would the treatment provided to orphaned or neglected African Americans differ from the treatment provided to white orphans, former owners of orphaned or poorly cared for children would also be the preference when the court searches for a suitable master for the child. Apprenticed children would be subject to “moderate” corporal punishment and protected from cruel or inhumane treatment.

Gender determines the term of an orphaned or neglected child's indenture. Males are apprentices until they reach the age of twenty-one; females can achieve release from their indenture upon their eighteenth birthdays. Further, the law allowed the “recapture” of apprentices who flee before their term of service ends, and it permits punishment of apprentices who refuse to return to their masters. Apprentices could, however, challenge their masters' rights to retain them against their will. If a county court judges the apprentice to have good cause for desiring an end to his or her indenture, the court could release the apprentice and fine the master up to $100. Any fine collected would be used for the benefit of the apprentice.

This section of the law also prohibits any white person from helping an apprentice escape his or her master or from enticing an apprentice to accept employment. Individuals convicted of violating the law would be subject to punishment.

An Act to Amend the Vagrant Laws of the State

This section of the law defines a broad swath of behavior, including juggling, gambling, and the habitual drinking of alcoholic beverages, as indicative of vagrancy. The law also classifies individuals (regardless of color) who do not work, misspend their money, and do not properly care for themselves or their dependents as vagrants. Prostitutes and gambling house operators, as well as all manner of citizens who obtain their income from illegal or immoral acts, are classified by the law as vagrants. Individuals who are convicted of vagrancy are fined up to $100 and may be sentenced to jail for up to ten days.

African Americans are subject to additional penalties for vagrancy, as are whites who are commonly associated with African Americans. Section 2 of the amendment clearly echoes Mississippi's antebellum slave code. Specifically, the section prohibits unemployed Blacks from free assembly; it prohibits white males from assembling with African Americans or from having sexual relations with Black women. Blacks who are convicted of vagrancy under Section 2 of the amendment are subject to a $50 fine and ten days in jail; white men are subject to a $200 fine and six months in jail.

If convicted, African Americans who cannot pay their fines are to be hired out by the county sheriff to labor until their fine is paid. If a Black vagrant is too old or infirm to be hired out, then the sheriff can treat the vagrant as a pauper. According to the law, African Americans eighteen to sixty-five years old are required to pay a $1 poll tax to fund the “Freedman's Pauper Fund” in each county. (White paupers are cared for through other means of taxation, not a special pauper's tax.) Refusal or inability to pay the tax results in an African American being classified as a vagrant and being hired out to anyone who is willing to pay the tax for the vagrant.