3.3 Black Codes, Land, and Labor

In 1865 and 1866, during Presidential Reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, many Southern state governments passed Black Codes. These laws undercut the rights African Americans had just gained and controlled their movement and labor. They aimed to restore the controls of the old slave codes (2.7).

Black Codes limited Black people's right to own or rent property and forced them to sign labor contracts, usually for a year at very low pay. People who tried to leave a contract could be whipped, and anyone without one could be fined or jailed for vagrancy, meaning having no job or home. Some codes let the state take Black children from their parents and force them into unpaid apprenticeships, often with their former enslavers, without their parents' consent. Outrage over the Black Codes helped push Congress to take control of Reconstruction and pass the Fourteenth Amendment (3.1).

In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Orders No. 15. It set aside about 400,000 acres of coastal land from South Carolina to Florida for freed families in plots of up to 40 acres. This is the origin of the phrase 'forty acres and a mule'. The required land order for Richard Brown (1865) is a record of the kind of grant families received.

Later in 1865, President Johnson reversed the order. Most of the land went back to former Confederate owners or was bought by Northern investors. Black families were evicted, and many had no choice but to work someone else's land.

Convict leasing used the Thirteenth Amendment's exception allowing forced labor as punishment for crime (2.24). The required photos from 1903 and about 1910 show Black children and men working as convicts in fields and camps. Many white Southerners, especially poor ones, were also caught in sharecropping and crop liens.

• Sharecropping: a landowner provided land, tools and a house; the worker paid with a large share of the crop, often half. It was very hard to get ahead.
• Crop liens: farmers with little cash bought food and supplies on credit, borrowing against their future harvest. Low crop prices and high interest often meant the harvest didn't cover the debt, so debt piled up year after year.
• Convict leasing: Southern prisons rented out prisoners to landowners and companies. Many were Black men arrested for debt, on false charges or for minor offenses such as vagrancy. They worked without pay in brutal conditions, often deadlier than slavery.