Five days after the Civil War ended, President Abraham Lincoln was shot. He died on April 15, 1865, and Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. The task of reuniting the nation fell on his shoulders. A Southerner, Johnson favored readmitting the Southern states as quickly as possible into the Union. He appointed military governors who held complete power in the former Confederate states until new civilian governments could be organized.
Little thought had been given to the needs of the newly emancipated slaves. Shortly before the end of the war, Congress created the Freedmen’s Bureau. It furnished food and medical aid to the former slaves. It also established schools for the freedmen. By 1870, a quarter million black children and adults attended more than 4,000 of these schools in the South.
The Freedmen’s Bureau also helped the former slaves in the workplace. It tried to make sure that the former slaves received fair wages and freely chose their employers. The bureau created special courts to settle disputes between black workers and their white employers. It could also intervene in other cases that threatened the rights of freedmen.
White Southerners resented being ruled by Union military governors and Freedmen’s Bureau officials. They sought to restore self-rule. During the summer and fall of 1865, most of the old Confederate states held constitutional conventions. President Johnson’s reconstruction plan permitted only white persons to vote for convention delegates or to participate in the framing of the new state governments. Not surprisingly, none of the state conventions considered extending the right to vote to the freedmen. South Carolina’s provisional governor declared at his state constitutional convention that “this is a white man’s government.”
By the end of the year, most of the South had held elections under the new state constitutions. Often, ex-Confederate leaders won elections for state government offices and for U.S. Congress.
The newly formed state legislatures quickly authorized many needed public projects and the taxes to pay for them. Among these projects was the creation, for the first time in the South, of free public education. But the public schools excluded black children.
The state legislatures also began to pass laws limiting the freedom of the former slaves. These laws mirrored those of colonial times, which placed severe restrictions on both slaves and emancipated blacks. Neither of these groups could vote, serve on juries, travel freely, or work in occupations of their choice. Even their marriages were outside the law.
The white legislators saw little reason not to continue the tradition of unequal treatment of black persons. An editorial in the Macon, Georgia, Daily Telegraph reflected the widely held opinion of the white South at this time: “There is such a radical difference in the mental and moral [nature] of the white and black race, that it would be impossible to secure order in a mixed community by the same [law].”
White Southerners also feared that if freedmen did not work for white landowners, the agricultural economy of the South would collapse. During the last months of 1865, a rumor spread among freedmen: The federal government was going to grant “40 acres and a mule” to every ex-slave family on Christmas Day. Although the federal government had confiscated some Confederate lands and given them to freed slaves, it never planned to do this on a massive scale. Nonetheless, expecting their own plots of land, blacks in large numbers refused to sign work contracts with white landowners for the new year. At the same time, Southern whites passed around their own rumor that blacks would rise in rebellion when the free land failed to appear on Christmas Day.
All these economic worries, prejudices, and fears helped produce the first Black Codes of 1865. These codes consisted of special laws that applied only to black persons. The first Black Code, enacted by Mississippi, proved harsh and vindictive. South Carolina followed with a code only slightly less harsh, but more comprehensive in regulating the lives of “persons of color.”
