The black codes enacted immediately after the American Civil War, though varying from state to state, were all intended to secure a steady supply of cheap labour, and all continued to assume the inferiority of the freed slaves. There were vagrancy laws that declared a black to be vagrant if unemployed and without permanent residence; a person so defined could be arrested, fined, and bound out for a term of labour if unable to pay the fine. Apprentice laws provided for the "hiring out" of orphans and other young dependents to whites, who often turned out to be their former owners. Some states limited the type of property blacks could own, and in others blacks were excluded from certain businesses or from the skilled trades. Former slaves were forbidden to carry firearms or to testify in court, except in cases concerning other blacks. Legal marriage between blacks was provided for, but interracial marriage was prohibited.

It was Northern reaction to the black codes (as well as to the bloody antiblack riots in Memphis and New Orleans in 1866; see New Orleans Race Riot) that helped produce Radical Reconstruction (see Reconstruction) and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. The Freedmen's Bureau was created in 1865 to help the former slaves. Reconstruction did away with the black codes, but, after Reconstruction was over, many of their provisions were reenacted in the Jim Crow laws, which were not finally done away with until passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

References:

1. Garraty, John A

A short history of the American nation, - 6th ed. – New York Collons college publ, 1992

2. Ray Allen Willington,

American frontier heritage,- New Mexico, Press 1991

3. Thomas A. Bailey

David M. Kennedy

The American pageant, - 9th ed.- Toronto