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By Root 1217 0

over his or her shoulders, in the manner practiced in the army,” for a period not to exceed twelve hours. While finding the ordinances “incompatible with freedom,” the black newspaper in New Orleans noted that freedmen could walk the streets up to ten o’clock at night—one hour later than under slavery. “This additional hour is the fruit of our victories in the field,” the editor declared; “four years of a bloody war have been fought to gain that one hour. The world certainly moves in that quarter.”75

With the adoption of the Black Codes, the place of the ex-slave in postwar southern society had been fixed in law, his mobility checked, his bargaining power sharply reduced, and his rights of appeal hedged with difficulties. Any freedman who refused to work at the prevailing wage in a particular area could be defined as a vagrant, and there was little to protect him from combinations of employers setting wages and conditions. To many in the North, the Codes smacked of the old bondage, and even some southern whites thought them ill-advised, impractical, or at least badly timed. “We showed our hand too soon,” a Mississippi planter conceded. “We ought to have waited till the troops were withdrawn, and our representatives admitted to Congress; then we could have had everything our own way.” Unmoved by the criticism they anticipated, the authors of the Florida code thought it “needless to attempt to satisfy the exactions of the fanatical theorists—we have a duty to perform—the protection of our wives and children from threatened danger, and the prevention of scenes which may cost the extinction of an entire race.” The special committee preparing the Mississippi code conceded that some of the proposed legislation “may seem rigid and stringent” but only “to the sickly modern humanitarians.”76

To the former slaves, whose opinions carried little weight, the Codes clouded the entire issue of freedom and left them highly dubious of what rights if any they could exercise without fear of arrest or legal harassment. In petitioning the governor, the freedmen of Claiborne County, Mississippi, thought it necessary to ask for a clarification: “Mississippi has abolished slavery. Does she mean it or is it a policy for the present?” By barring them from leasing or renting land, the petitioners charged that the legislature had left them with no choice but to purchase land, knowing full well that “not one of us out of a thousand” could afford the price of even a quarter of an acre. If any of them deserted an employer because of cruel treatment, they could be arrested and forcibly returned to him. How could this be reconciled with their newly won freedom? “Now we are free,” they insisted, “we do not want to be hunted by negro runners and their hounds unless we are guilty of a criminal crime.” To read the daily newspapers, the petitioners asserted, was to learn only of “our faults” rather than of the many blacks who worked to enrich the very people seeking to circumscribe their liberties. Who made possible the comforts of the planter class if not hard-working black men and women?

If every one of us colored people were removed from the state of Mississippi our superiors would soon find out who were their supporters. We the laborers have enriched them and it is as much impossible for them to live with out us as it is for we to be removed from them.

The petitioners assured the governor of their willingness to work for anyone who treated them well and paid them adequately; they reminded him, too, of how the slaves had stood by their white families in troublesome times. Although they recognized the presence of some “good and honest” employers among the whites, such men were “not the majority” and the “good” employer could be easily intimidated and “put down as a negro spoiler.” Finally, the petitioners thought Jefferson Davis, a fellow Mississippian, should be set free, if only because “we [know] worse Masters than he was. Altho he tried hard to keep us all slaves we forgive him.”77

But even as black petitioners and conventions condemned the Black