The Slow Road to Freedom: The Black Codes

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Recommended: Free slaves in the 1800s

Confusion abounded in the still-smoldering South about the precise meaning of “freedom” for blacks. Emancipation took effect haltingly and unevenly in different parts of the conquered Confederacy. As Union armies marched in and out of various localities, many blacks found themselves emancipated and then re-enslaved. Blacks from one Texas county fleeing to the free soil of the liberated county next door were attacked by slave owners as they swam across the river that marked the county line. The next day trees along the riverbank were bent with swinging corpses – a grisly warning to others dreaming of liberty. Other planters resisted emancipation more legalistically, stubbornly protesting that slavery was lawful until state legislatures or the Supreme Court declared otherwise. For many slaves the shackles of slavery were not struck off in a mighty single blow but had to be broken link by link.

Prodded by the bayonets of Yankee armies all masters were eventually forced to recognize their slaves’ freedom. Some blacks initially responded to news of their newly granted freedom with suspicion and uncertainty. Loyalty to the plantation master prompted some slaves to resist the liberating Union armies, while other slaves’ pent up bitterness burst forth violently on the day of liberation. Many newly emancipated slaves, for example, joined Union troops in pillaging their masters’ possessions. Many took new names in place of the ones given by their masters and demanded that whites formally address them as “Mr.” or “Mrs.”

Tens of thousands of emancipated blacks took to the roads, some to test their freedom, others to search for long-lost spouses, parents, and children. Emancipation thus strengthened the black family, and many newl...

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...s of blood. The Black Codes imposed terrible burdens on the unfettered blacks, struggling against mistreatment and poverty to make their way as free people. The worst features of the Black Codes would eventually be repealed, but their revocation could not by itself lift the liberated blacks into economic independence. Lacking capital, and with little to offer but their labor, thousands of impoverished former slaves slipped into the status of sharecropper farmers, as did many landless whites. Formerly slaves to masters, countless blacks as well as poorer whites in effect became slaves to the soil and to their creditors.

The Black Codes made an ugly impression in the North. If the former slaves were being re-enslaved people asked one another, had not the Boys in Blue spilled their blood in vain? Had the North really won the war?

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