Edmonia Highgate recognized that slavery’s long legacy of prejudice and discrimination would be difficult to overcome. In a speech delivered to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society the African American social activist warned that our “work in the South is not yet half done.”
Highgate warning proved to be prophetic. In the months following the Civil War, Southern states enacted Black Codes designed to limit the labor, mobility, and rights of African Americans. For example, a law in Mississippi required every freedman to annually sign a one-year labor contract. The document made it a crime to give food, clothing, or shelter to any African American worker who left his or her employer while still under contract. Other laws forbade blacks from owning guns, marrying whites, or assembling in groups.
Frederick Douglass recognized that the Black Codes had the common goal of returning the freedmen to a system resembling slavery. He denounced the laws for making the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation “a mockery and delusion.” Douglass grimly warned that the Black Codes “defeat the beneficent intention of the Government, if it has beneficent intention, in regard to the freedom of our people.”
The intentions of the federal government quickly became a hotly disputed issue. President Johnson did not object to the Black Codes. His lenient view of Reconstruction placed the President on a collision course with a Congress dominated by Radical Republicans who wanted to transform the South by extending civil and political rights to African Americans.
The Fourteenth Amendment countered Johnson’s lenient program and overturned the Black Codes. The first section granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This famous definition overturned both the Dred Scott decision and the Three-Fifths Compromise.
The Fourteenth Amendment also prohibited the states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction equal protection of the laws.” The phrase “equal protection of the laws” is the only reference to idea of equality in the Constitution.
So why should you remember the Black Codes and the Fourteenth Amendment? APUSH test writers expect you to know that the Black Codes limited the basic human rights and civil liberties of the newly freed blacks. They will also expect you to know that the Black Codes played an important role in bringing about the impeachment of President Johnson and the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The full force of the amendment’s equal protection clause would not be felt until the High Court used it to justify striking down segregation in the public schools.