Life After Slavery
Reconstruction defines the period after the Civil War when the federal government controlled former Confederate states. When federal troops were stationed in the South, African Americans made economic progress and elected representatives to local, state, and national office. But when federal troops withdrew in 1877, white southerners challenged African Americans’ rights and freedoms. Violence and intimidation were used to keep African Americans from voting, owning land, and exercising their independence.
Black Codes After the Civil War
The KKK sought to recreate the pre-Civil War economic and social order.
Laws of the State of Mississippi including the Black Codes, 1865
After the Civil War, former Confederate states created a system of laws—Black Codes—restricting African Americans’ civil and economic rights. Black Codes punished vagrancy, forced freedmen to sign labor contracts, and blocked African Americans’ right to vote. Violators were subject to arrest and prisoners’ labor could be sold.
Slave Codes
Virginia Slave Code
Ohio’s “Black Laws,” 1807
Slave Codes defined enslaved people as property that could be worked, sold, abused, and killed. Slave Codes denied enslaved people the right to marry, travel, gather in groups, or be educated. These laws made slavery a race-based, permanent, inheritable condition. Children born to an enslaved women were by law enslaved themselves, even if the father was a free person or an enslaver. The codes even restricted the rights of free Black people.
Black Codes created after the Civil War were similar to Slave Codes. The Black Codes’ goal was to maintain white control.
Clara Brown
Clara Brown
Clara Brown was born enslaved in Virginia in 1800. She remained in bondage in Logan County, Kentucky, until 1859 when she gained her freedom. Kentucky’s Slave Code required Black people freed by their enslaver to leave the state.
Working as a cook on a wagon train, Brown relocated to Denver, Colorado—one of the first African American women to settle there. She purchased land in Colorado, established a successful laundry business, and became a respected philanthropic member of the community. Brown helped newly freed people move to Colorado and searched for her four children whom she had been separated from during slavery. She eventually found her surviving daughter and granddaughter and brought them to Colorado.
Challenging the Black Codes
National Convention of Colored People, Nashville, Tennessee
African Americans took various steps to resist Black Codes, including developing community institutions and organizing politically. At the state and national level, African Americans led conventions that fought for voting rights and fair treatment. Elected Black politicians supported legislation that guaranteed equal rights.
We have now thrown off the mask, hereafter to do our talking, and to use all legitimate means to get and to enjoy our political privileges.
Delegates to the 1865 Convention of Colored Citizens of the State of Arkansas, 1865
Congressman Robert Smalls
Robert Smalls
Robert Smalls, a Civil War hero from South Carolina, was one of more than 1,400 Black men who held political office in the South during and after Reconstruction. He was elected to several offices, including the U.S. House of Representatives. Like other Black politicians, he eventually lost his office when southern Democrats disenfranchised African Americans. Smalls was the longest serving African American member of Congress until Adam Clayton Powell Jr. served 12 terms half a century later.
Smalls tried, unsuccessfully, to stop the disfranchisement of African Americans in South Carolina’s 1895 Constitution.
