William A. Dunning
To a distrustful northern mind such legislation could very easily take the form of a
systematic attempt to relegate the freedmen to a subjection only less complete than
that from which the war had set them free. The radicals sounded a shrill note of
alarm. “We tell the white men of Mississippi,” said the Chicago Tribune, “that the
men of the North will convert the state of Mississippi into a frog-pond before they
will allow any such laws to disgrace one foot of soil over which the flag of
freedom waves.” In Congress, Wilson, Sumner, and other extremists took up the
cry, and with superfluous ingenuity distorted the spirit and purpose of both the
laws and the law-makers of the South. The “black codes” were represented to be
the expression of a deliberate purpose by the southerners to nullify the result of the
war and reestablish slavery, and this impression gained wide prevalence in the
North.
Yet, as a matter of fact, this legislation, far from embodying any spirit of
defiance towards the North or any purpose to evade the conditions which the
victors had imposed, was in the main a conscientious and straightforward attempt
to bring some sort of order out of the social and economic chaos which a full
acceptance of the results of war and emancipation involved. In its general principle
it corresponded very closely to the actual facts of the situation. The freedmen were
not, and in the nature of the case could not for generations be, on the same social,
moral, and intellectual plane with the whites; and this fact was recognized by
constituting them a separate class in the civil order. As in general principles, so in
details, the legislation was faithful on the whole to the actual conditions with
which it had to deal. The restrictions in respect to bearing arms, testifying in court,
and keeping labor contracts were justified by well-established traits and habits of
the negroes; and the vagrancy laws dealt with problems of destitution, idleness,
and vice of which no one not in the midst of them could appreciate the appalling
magnitude and complexity.
William A. Dunning, Reconstruction: Political and Economic, 1865-1877 (1907; reprint, New York: Harper & Row [Harper Torchbooks], 1962), pp. 57-58.
