Black Code of Mississippi

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 disdain for Republican measures directed toward ensuring the liberty of former slaves, Congress exerted its authority in 1866 and took over the reigns of Reconstruction. With a military governor placed in charge of Reconstruction in Mississippi, the state convened a new constitutional convention, a body elected in the first biracial, statewide election. The constitution that eventually emerged granted the full measure of citizenship to African Americans and thereby removed the Mississippi Black Code from the law books. Despite the code's brief life span, its impact reverberated broadly and throughout the course of Reconstruction.