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Milestone Documents in American History

Black Code of Mississippi: Document Analysis

by Bradley G. Bond

Overview

In 1865 the Mississippi state legislature passed a series of related laws known as the Black Code. These laws, written within months of the conclusion of the Civil War and styled after the state’s antebellum slave code, represented the first effort by white Mississippians to define what freedom and citizenship would mean to recently freed slaves and others of African descent. As the Black Code reveals, the initial legal definition that whites offered suggests that they intended the condition of freedom for blacks to differ little from enslavement.

The Mississippi Black Code was the most extreme example of similar codes that sought to nullify the freedom of former slaves and to define their citizenship as virtual enslavement. The laws consequently offer an example of the attitudes of whites toward freed people and other people of African descent; they also testify to the persistence of those attitudes across time. Finally, the Black Code is significant because its existence proved to the United States Congress that southern states needed a more thoroughgoing reconstruction than that called for by President Andrew Johnson. A year after the passage of the Black Code, Congress assumed authority over Reconstruction in the southern states.

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.

Governor Benjamin Grubb Humphreys was responsible for pushing the Black Code through the Mississippi legislature.

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Library of Congress

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.

Timeline

1860

December 20 South Carolina secedes from the Union.

1861

January 9 Mississippi secedes from the Union.
April 12 The first shots of the Civil War are fired at Fort Sumter in the harbor at Charleston, South Carolina.

1865

April 9 Robert E. Lee surrenders the bulk of the Confederate army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.
April 15 President Abraham Lincoln dies after being shot the previous day, and Andrew Johnson becomes president.
November 25 The Mississippi legislature passes the Black Code.

1867

March 26 General E. O. C. Ord arrives in Mississippi as military governor, signaling the start of congressional Reconstruction in the state.

1875

November 10 The election of the Democrat John Marshal Stone signals the end of the Reconstruction in Mississippi and the beginning of a slow but certain retreat from the recognition of the fullness of African American citizenship.

About the Author

A number of legislators contributed to the authorship of the Mississippi Black Code. While Governor Benjamin Grubb Humphreys probably did not write a word of the laws, he was singularly responsible for pushing the bill through the legislature. Debate over the code consumed an inordinate amount of time in the first postwar session of the legislature. The law was finally approved only when Humphreys offered a compromise between legislators, some of whom wanted to appease Republicans in Washington and thereby to avoid a more stringent Reconstruction process, and some of whom wished to ignore the demands of the federal government and the significance of the Confederacy’s military defeat.

Humphreys (1808-1882) was a native of Claiborne County, Mississippi, and a brigadier general in the Confederate army. Before the war, he attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, though his participation in a rowdy demonstration, which led to a riot, caused him to be expelled. After his dismissal, he returned to Mississippi, where he became a cotton planter and politician in Sunflower County, the heart of the Mississippi Delta. In 1865 white Mississippians elected him governor, and in 1867 they reelected him. By that time, congressional Reconstruction had begun, and he resigned his office in 1868 soon after being sworn in, rather than operate under the supervision of a military governor. For almost ten years he worked for an insurance company in Jackson, Mississippi, before retiring back to his Sunflower County home.

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.

Audience

Public laws are written, in part, to shape behavior. Consequently, the audience to whom the Mississippi Black Code was addressed included all of Mississippi’s residents and visitors. However, few Mississippians, including lawyers, law enforcement officials, and judges, would have read the actual text of the law.

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” (“African American Voices,” www.digitalhistory.uh.edu).

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.

Bibliography

Books

Bond, Bradley G. Political Culture in the Nineteenth-Century South: Mississippi, 1830-1900 . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995.

Harris, William C. Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967.

———. The Day of the Carpetbagger: Republication Reconstruction in Mississippi . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Journal of the Proceedings and Debates in the Constitutional Convention of the State of Mississippi, August, 1865 . Jackson, Miss., 1865.

Morgan, A. T. Yazoo; or, On the Picket Line of Freedom in the South: A Personal Narrative . 1884. Reprint. New York: Russell and Russell, 1968.

Wharton, Vernon Lane. Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947.

Web Sites

“African American Voices.” Digital History Web site

www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/. Accessed on January 7, 2008.

“Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1865-1876.” Mississippi History Now Web site

teacherexchange.mde.k12.ms.us/. Accessed on January 7, 2008.

Questions for Further Study

1. Compare the Mississippi Black Code with the state’s antebellum slave code.
2. How did the Mississippi Black Code differ from the Louisiana Black Code? How might those differences be explained?
3. Describe the restrictions placed upon African Americans by the Mississippi Black Code and by formal laws and ordinances enforced during the epoch of Jim Crow.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Bond, Bradley G. "Black Code Of Mississippi: Document Analysis." Milestone Documents in American History, edited by Paul Finkelman, Salem Press, 2008. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=mdah_55a.

APA 7th

Bond, B. G. (2008). Black Code of Mississippi: Document Analysis. In P. Finkelman (Ed.), Milestone Documents in American History. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Bond, Bradley G. "Black Code Of Mississippi: Document Analysis." Edited by Paul Finkelman. Milestone Documents in American History. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2008. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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