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.