Freed-Person of Color’s Moral Situation in Mississippi during Reconstruction

Abstract

When Mississippi voted to abolish slavery in 1865 “times were especially tough for Mississippi’s newly freed slaves.”¹ Mississippi’s decision to retain its Confederacy status² signaled that the end of the Civil War was not, however, the end of oppressive conditions for blacks. In a move that would have devastating consequences for freed-persons of color, Mississippi adopted black codes³ to regulate African Americans’ participation in the state’s civic life. The adoption of these codes by most southern states was one way to “forecast, to a remarkable degree, the future attitude of former Confederates toward the place of blacks in the South and in American life,”⁴ asserted historian John Hope Franklin. Almost as a symbol of both allegiance to southern traditions and defiance of the Union’s military victory, these policies—implemented to control a recently emancipated labor pool—were essentially “systems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery,”⁵ as historian C. Vann Woodward noted. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his extensive research on Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, emphasized that black codes were a vehicle by which “Mississippi simply re enacted her slave code.”⁶ After all, as Franklin pointed out, “most of the laws employed such terms as ‘master’ and ‘servant’ and clearly implied a distinction that consigned blacks to a hopeless inferior status.”⁷