Crime and Punishment in American History - Lawrence M. Friedman [59]
The Civil War, which broke out in 1861, was long, bloody, and devastating. Much of it was fought in the South, and it ripped apart the whole social fabric of that region. When the war ended, large parts of the South lay in ruins, and the cemeteries were full of the bodies of young southern men. The slaves were free. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution made this situation permanent.
What the war had not changed, and could not change, was the feelings of southern whites toward black people. As soon as the guns stopped shooting, the old slave states immediately began what Eric Foner has called a “search ... for legal means of subordinating a volatile black population,” and a search for ways to bring back as much of the substance of the slave-labor system as possible.46
White supremacy was anything but gone with the wind. The infamous “Black Codes” of Mississippi, South Carolina, and other southern states blatantly attempted to tie black workers to the soil, not as slaves (that was illegal), but as peons, or, to give the matter its best face, as contract laborers for white employers. Criminal provisions were a vital part of the codes. A black who quit his job while he was under contract to work was liable to arrest. It was a crime to “entice” a worker away from his job. In Mississippi, under a typical provision, all “freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes” who were over eighteen, and had “no lawful employment or business,” were declared to be “vagrants.” A vagrant could be fined up to fifty dollars—an enormous sum for a poor exslave—and imprisoned up to ten days; if a black could not pay the fine, the sheriff could hire him out to anybody willing to pay it, with a “preference” going to his employer, if he had one. The employer was then entitled to deduct these payments from the black’s wages.47 This was not slavery, of course, but dangerously close.
The Reconstruction governments, which the South had to accept, kicking and screaming, put an end to some of the most blatant aspects of the Black Codes; but a surprising number of the provisions lived on, even during the Reconstruction period, when blacks served in southern legislatures and had at least some measure of political power. It goes without saying that the white-supremacy governments, which gained power in the 1870s and held on to it tightly, made lush use of these instruments of suppression—vagrancy laws, enticement laws, and the rest.
Even before power devolved on these governments, the white South gained domination through the use of plain brute force. The Ku Klux Klan ravaged the South, killing and burning, intimidating blacks and any whites who dared oppose the Klan.s Congress passed acts that were supposed to safeguard the rights of blacks and put an end to the Klan: notably, the so-called Enforcement Act of 1870.48 Supposedly, federal efforts help smash the Klan; but in a way the men in white sheets had the last laugh. The regime they established lasted for about a hundred years.
The Klan was hardly needed after the northern armies withdrew and southern whites were back in the saddle. During the long night of segregation and white supremacy, criminal justice systems in the southern states served as foot soldiers in the army of the dominant race. The black population was a kind of caste of untouchables. Keeping them in their place was a primary function of courts, laws, and police. Their place was on the land, working for white landowners, socially