Black Codes of 1865: Mississippi's January Deadline and the Pauper's Oath

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The Black Codes that Southern states passed in 1865, starting with Mississippi and South Carolina, drew on a legal tradition centuries old. This episode traces vagrancy laws to England after the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, when landowners criminalized poor and mobile workers to keep labor cheap and captive. Before the Civil War, both North and South regulated free Black people: Charleston around 1820 taxed free Black tradespeople and fined free Black men for wearing pocket watches, Illinois threatened deportation after 10 days, and Ohio required good behavior bonds. After emancipation, planters treated freedpeople's wish for shorter hours and time with family as a crisis, and the Union Army and Freedmen's Bureau enforced year-long contracts paying about $10 a month plus rations.

Early codes copied the old slave codes, replacing the word slave with Negro or freedman. In Mississippi, anyone without a signed annual labor contract by the second Monday in January could be arrested as a vagrant, fined, and have their labor auctioned on the courthouse steps, often to a former enslaver. Congress answered with the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over Andrew Johnson's veto, the 14th Amendment and the Reconstruction Acts, so states rewrote the laws in race-neutral language. After 1877, convict leasing let railroads and mining companies rent prisoners from the state, a system historian Douglas Blackmon called slavery by another name. A major vagrancy ordinance was not struck down until Papachristou v. Jacksonville in 1972.

• Pig laws imposed felony penalties for stealing a single farm animal.
• Bans on hunting on Sundays kept workers from feeding their families on their only day off.
• Apprentice laws let courts declare poor Black parents unfit and bind their children to former owners, with corporal punishment allowed.
• White defendants could swear a pauper's oath and go free, while Black defendants who tried were sent to the auction block.
• Laws barred Black Americans from renting land outside city limits, blocking them from starting independent farms.