EOTO - The Black Codes (Script)

This is an illustration of Black Americans waiting to receive labor contracts.

 EOTO Script - Black Codes

Good afternoon, everyone. Today’s topic is the Black Codes: laws passed just after the Civil War, in the first phase of Reconstruction, that grew directly out of the war’s outcome.

Picture it. Fall of 1865. The war is over. The Thirteenth Amendment has been passed, but not yet ratified. Four million people are almost free.

And Southern lawmakers are already asking how to control them.

Now what?

Southern legislatures, now full of former Confederates, had an answer. Mississippi passed the first Black Code in November 1865. South Carolina followed within weeks. By 1866, nearly every Southern state had its own version.

The codes had three main weapons.

This is a political cartoon representing the evils of the Black Codes.

First, vagrancy laws. If you were Black and unemployed, you could be arrested as a vagrant, fined, and if you couldn’t pay, your labor could be sold off.

Second, labor contracts. Workers were pushed into yearly contracts. Break one, and you risked arrest and/or unpaid labor.

Third, apprenticeship laws. Black children, especially orphans, could be taken from their families and bound to white employers, sometimes their former enslavers, until they were eighteen or twenty-one.

Some codes did grant real things: the right to marry, to own property, to sue in court. But those rights came on a leash.

And the North noticed. Many Northerners saw the codes as slavery
under a new name. They had fought a war for free labor, and this looked like a betrayal.

That outrage changed history.

In 1866, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act over President Andrew Johnson’s veto. It declared Black Americans citizens with equal legal protection, and it was meant to wipe out the codes. Congress then wrote the Fourteenth Amendment, and in 1867, Congressional Reconstruction began.

So, did the Black Codes disappear? Not really.

This is an example of people who protested the Jim Crow Laws.

After Reconstruction ended in 1877, Southern states revived many of the same ideas as Jim Crow laws. Those stayed in place for nearly a century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Here’s what I want you to remember.

Freedom on paper is not the same as freedom in practice. The Black Codes show how quickly laws can be used to rebuild what a war was supposed to destroy.

Thank you.

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AI Disclosure: AI was used heavily in the creation of this blog post, as Claude was used to aid me in my research and to write the script above, which, totaling 3 minutes, is meant to reinforce the information in the initial post and to teach the class about the Black Codes. This script is for an in-class Each One Teach One Presentation.

Reconstruction Documentary

The Promise and Collapse of Reconstruction

On June 17, 2015, a white man entered a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina, and carried out a massacre.

This is a screenshot of a CNN broadcast showing the victims of the massacre.

The documentary opens there for a reason.

A century and a half later, we are still haunted by the collapse of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction began as a period of extraordinary excitement. After Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, Americans had the chance to become fully free. Legions of enslaved people had already defied their masters and fled to Union lines, and 180,000 Black men, mostly former slaves, joined the military. Their service was crucial to emancipation.

Then Lincoln was assassinated.

Andrew Johnson became the first president made by an assassin’s bullet. Frederick Douglass doubted him: “No matter what else Andrew Johnson is, he is no friend of the black.”

For many freed people, true freedom meant owning land. The Freedmen’s Bureau had land to distribute, but its budget was little more than the cost of one week of fighting the war.

Johnson then pardoned many former Confederates and began selling land back to them. Labor contracts followed, essentially selling people back to their former owners.

The United States had a chance to make former slaves economically independent.

It failed.

Then came the Black Codes. They acknowledged slavery’s end while ensuring as little changed as possible. Vagrancy laws fined or forced into labor contracts any Black person deemed idle, and families lost their children.

Violence followed. 

This is an illustration of the riot-burning of a Freedmen's School-House.

In Memphis, white mobs hunted Black residents, burned every Black church and school, and killed 48 people. Only two of the dead were white. The violence ran one way: white residents killed Black residents, never the reverse.

Survivors’ testimony pushed Republicans to act with the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to everyone born in the US.

In 1867, Congress imposed military Reconstruction, requiring rebel states to adopt new constitutions granting Black men the vote. By year’s end, more than 80 percent of Black men were eligible.

Historian Eric Foner reminds us that a new society had to be built, and racism did not vanish with slavery.

This is a photo of Eric Foner.

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AI Disclosure: AI was used heavily in this assignment, as I gave the AI assistant Claude the notes I took while watching a documentary in class about Reconstruction after the Civil War. I asked Claude to format my notes into a professional blog post, using only my notes and no outside research whatsoever.

EOTO - The Black Codes

This is an image showing a drawn representation of the Black Codes.

Freedom With Strings Attached: The Black Codes Explained

When the Civil War ended, the biggest question wasn’t who had won. It was what freedom would actually look like.

Southern lawmakers answered quickly. Their answer wasn’t generous.

Setting the Scene

Strictly speaking, the Black Codes belong to Reconstruction, not the war years. They were enacted in 1865 and 1866, right after the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery. But they can’t be separated from the Civil War: they were the South’s response to losing it.

How They Worked

Mississippi passed the first codes in late 1865, and nearly every former Confederate state followed with its own version by 1866. The details varied. The goal didn’t: keep a cheap, controllable workforce in place.

Three tools did most of the work.

This is a servant farming under a labor contract.

Vagrancy laws turned unemployment into a crime. A Black person without a job could be arrested, fined, and forced to labor if they couldn’t pay.

Labor contracts came next. Many states required yearly contracts. Refuse, and you risked arrest, fines, and unpaid work.

Apprenticeship laws targeted children. Black orphans and other young dependents could be hired out to white employers, sometimes their former enslavers.

Some codes did grant limited rights, like marrying and making contracts. But those rights came with a leash.

The Backlash

The codes arrived alongside a rise in violence against freed people, a reminder that the laws weren’t operating in a vacuum.

Northerners noticed. For many in the North, Black freedom had become a core aim of the war. They saw the codes as slavery in disguise, and that outrage helped fuel the “Radical” phase of Reconstruction.

A political cartoon depicting a civil rights bill being handed to a black man.

In 1866, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act over President Andrew Johnson’s veto. It was designed to nullify the codes by guaranteeing equal legal protection. Republicans overrode the veto in April 1866, a bold expansion of federal power. The Fourteenth Amendment followed.

The Freedmen’s Bureau, created in March 1865, was meant to ease the move from slavery to freedom, and Congress extended its life to push back against the codes. But enforcement was uneven, and many Southern courts stayed hostile.

Did the Codes Die?

Not really. Reconstruction struck them down on paper, but after it ended in 1877, Southern states reenacted many of the same provisions as Jim Crow laws, which lasted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Read It for Yourself

The best way to understand the codes is to read them. The full text of Mississippi’s 1865 laws is online, including the apprentice and vagrancy acts. The language is bureaucratic, calm, and chilling.

An African American and a White person clasping hands in unison. 

Why It Matters

Courts, legislatures, and ordinary people all shaped what freedom meant after 1865. Some tried to expand it. Others tried to shrink it.

The Black Codes show that ending a legal system doesn’t automatically end the habits and interests
behind it. Abolition was a legal event. Freedom had to be built and defended.

Freedom on paper isn’t freedom in practice. That’s a lesson worth carrying beyond the history classroom.

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AI Disclosure: AI was used heavily in the creation of this blog post, as Claude was used to aid me in my research, as well as to format that research into a professional-style blog post along with a three-minute script for an Each One Teach One presentation.

Gone with the Wind Film Reflection

 

Scarlet O'Hara embraces Rhett Butler.

Gone with the Wind is not only a beautifully produced and well-written film, but also an attempt to represent life in the South during the Civil War era, which, in many ways, it portrays perfectly, but in others, it seems to fall short. I believe that the discussion of fact versus fiction in this movie can be argued both ways, as even though it is an incredibly stylized and dramatized story, it still reveals the real issues and destruction of the time.

The overall plot definitely revealed some of the horrors of war, like the destruction of families, respiratory illnesses caused by smog, dust, and smoke, as well as the destruction of towns and cities. This is represented very well by the scene in the church, where a pastor is shown individually praying over the injured troops housed there while loud booms resonate outside the walls. It also goes into detail, showing some specific soldiers. One has to have his leg amputated, and another has a nurse or assistant write a letter for him detailing how he isn't going to see who it was addressed to ever again.

It is very evident in how the film plays out that the violence of the Civil War was massively changing the South's perception of the frailty and fragility of life, and that it's not always full of the splendor of wealth and constant protection.

This is a headshot of Scarlet O'Hara.

A perfect example of this perspective shift is the character progression of Scarlet O'Hara. She starts the film as a sort of Southern belle, or an "innocent" unmarried woman who has a major dependence on the men in her life. This archetype is very evident at the start, as she is fawned over by almost all of the men she interacts with and acts very dependent on them, seemingly for attention. This is even more evident towards the middle of the film, when she marries Charles Hamilton right before he leaves for war. He then dies of an illness, and she is made to mourn, as that was the socially acceptable thing to do at the time. She, however, didn't want to mourn, as the only thing she was sad over was the fact that she couldn't have Charles's cousin Ashley Wilkes, who she was obsessed with.

This attitude stays prevalent until the Union forces show up and she is sort of "snapped" into reality. The shift is very obvious when both she and Prissy have to assist Melanie Hamilton in childbirth in the midst of the chaos. Her character here begins to act more seriously as she realizes the true reality of the situation, slipping out of this Southern belle attitude.

This same progression is definitely reflective of real history, as it's very realistic to think about this exact situation happening to many real people at the time. This also is not restricted to the Civil War, as women throughout history have, of course, been very influential and have had this same progression in attitude. For example, the "We Can Do It" posters in World War 2, were created to strengthen the morale of women workers and encourage those not working to do just that.

As a whole, this film is a piece of art, and each frame could be an individual Renaissance painting. It was truly generational, not only because of the artistry and polished writing, but because of the truths it revealed about the horrors in the South during the Civil War. It also did a lot to empower women and showed them that they didn't have to be subservient or "innocent," but they could take initiative to help efforts not just in war, but in society as a whole.

This is a wide shot of Scarlet and Rhett looking out at Tara

EOTO Reflection - The Positives and Negatives of Slavery

During the EOTO presentations, both the positives and negatives of slavery were discussed to further reinforce the mock trial done in class. Many different events were discussed that led to positive effects regarding the abolition of slavery, as well as negative effects, more specifically, the events and time periods that caused damage to society or certain people groups.

Above is an illustration of the Missouri Compromise.

To start with the positives, we can look at just one of the many examples given: The Missouri Compromise of 1820. 

Before this compromise, there were 11 free states and 11 slave states, and Missouri wanted to become a slave state. To maintain the balance, but also keep everyone happy, Henry Clay helped create a compromise between Missouri and the rest of the states. Maine was admitted as a free state, so there would still be an even number of slave and free states. 

It also drew a sort of proper "line" between the free and slave states. This balance remained very important as it helped keep people from fighting over beliefs and created a sort of mutual respect in society at the time. This is further reinforced by the 30-years of Sectional Peace, which was a 30-year lapse of time in which there was "sectional peace" or simply no conflict between states. 

This time of peace sadly came to an end in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed slavery north of Missouri's southern border. Furthermore, in 1857, the Dred Scott decision ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional and also ruled that African Americans could never become official citizens of the U.S. The collapse of the Missouri Compromise, which was one of the only things preventing a civil war between the northern and southern states, led directly to the Civil War in 1861. It also pushed the U.S. to consider new solutions to fix the issue of division rooted in differences in opinion on whether slavery is beneficial or not.

Above is John Brown.

Now, we need to look at the negatives. A good example to look at would be the legacy of John Brown. He was born in Connecticut and grew up in a strictly religious home. He grew up with the belief that slavery was morally evil and that action needed to be taken. 

He grew up in North Elba, New York, among black families. In 1855, he began to involve himself in violent conflicts in Kansas, such as the Pottawatomie Killings, which consisted of an anti-slavery party led by John Brown killing 5 people from a pro-slavery settlement. His most infamous event was his raid on Harpers Ferry. 

They went to the armory to try to steal their weaponry and gain an easy gateway to the south. This did not work out; however, after fighting for two days, Brown and his followers were subdued and later hanged for treason. This is important as it is considered today as one of the main incidents that led to the civil war.

In conclusion, looking at these kinds of things surrounding slavery is very important to see why it was abolished, and all of the events that led up to its abolition. I found it interesting to be able to see both sides at the same time and how they both led to the Civil War.

Wendell Phillips Script

Above is a photo of Wendell Phillips.

Wendell Phillips: Abolitionist Views

Introduction

Good afternoon.

My name is Wendell Phillips, and I stand before you as an abolitionist, an orator, and a man who believes that freedom belongs to every human being.

Who I Am

I was born into a wealthy family in Boston and educated at Harvard. I could have chosen a comfortable life practicing law and enjoying the privileges that came with my position in society.

Instead, I chose a different path.

As I watched the treatment of enslaved men, women, and children in this country, I came to a simple conclusion: slavery is morally wrong. No person has the right to own another person. Human beings are not property. They are entitled to liberty, dignity, and the opportunity to live as free citizens.

My Feelings on Slavery

This is someone breaking chains from
between their wrists.

Many people told me that speaking against slavery was dangerous. They warned me that I would lose friends, social standing, and political opportunities.

They were correct.

But there are moments when silence becomes its own form of injustice.

I could not remain silent while millions of people were denied their freedom. Slavery was not simply a political issue to me. It was a moral evil that violated the principles of justice and humanity.

Why I Became an Abolitionist

One event that strengthened my resolve was the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy in 1837. His death showed me how fiercely supporters of slavery would defend an unjust system.

It also convinced me that people of conscience had a duty to speak even louder.

That same year, after delivering a speech in Boston condemning the violence against Lovejoy, I became one of the leading voices of the abolitionist movement. 

My Mission

Throughout my life, I traveled and delivered speeches across the nation because I believed public opinion could change the course of history.

Wendell Phillips speaks to the public.

I challenged Americans to look beyond politics and economics and focus on a simple question:

Is slavery right or wrong?

To me, the answer was obvious.

America spoke of liberty while millions remained in bondage. That contradiction could not continue forever. 

Every day slavery existed was another day of stolen freedom, broken families, and unnecessary suffering.

Conclusion

I did not believe justice should be delayed. I argued for immediate emancipation because freedom is a right, not a privilege.

So, I leave you with this thought:

Progress begins when ordinary people refuse to accept injustice as normal.

Thank you.

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AI Disclosure: AI was used very heavily in this assignment, as I researched with AI and had Copilot format it into a three-minute script to read in class. This was done along with the Wendell Phillips blog post, so much of the information here is expanded upon in that post.

The Religious/Moral Defense of John Mann

Understanding the Religious and Moral Defense of Slavery in State v. Mann

The 1829 North Carolina case State v. Mann forced Americans to confront a difficult question: how much power did a slaveholder possess over an enslaved person?

In the case, John Mann had rented an enslaved woman named Lydia. After she attempted to flee punishment, Mann shot and wounded her. The North Carolina Supreme Court ultimately ruled in his favor and reinforced the idea that a slaveholder's authority had to remain virtually absolute. 

To modern readers, that decision is shocking.

But supporters of slavery in the early nineteenth century often relied on religious and moral arguments that they believed justified the institution.

A photo of an open Bible against a dark background

One common argument came from the Bible. Pro-slavery advocates pointed to passages that referred to masters and servants, arguing that Scripture regulated slavery rather than prohibiting it. Many Southern ministers taught that the institution was compatible with Christianity so long as masters fulfilled what they viewed as their obligations to those they enslaved.

Another argument focused on paternalism.

Slaveholders often portrayed themselves as protectors who provided food, shelter, and guidance. They claimed that authority over enslaved people came with responsibility and that discipline was necessary to maintain order. Historians now recognize that this paternalistic language often masked the violence and coercion required to sustain slavery, but it was a powerful part of the pro-slavery worldview.

These ideas appeared alongside legal arguments in State v. Mann.

Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin

Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin acknowledged that slavery presented profound moral difficulties. Yet he concluded that the institution could not function unless masters retained what he described as absolute power over enslaved people. In his view, limiting that authority would threaten the entire system of slavery. 

The case, therefore, reveals an important historical reality. Defenders of slavery rarely relied on economics alone. They also used religious reasoning, moral language, and claims about social order to justify the institution. These arguments helped sustain slavery in the minds of many Americans before the Civil War.

Today, historians study State v. Mann not because its reasoning was correct, but because it demonstrates how law, religion, and ideas about morality were used to support slavery in the United States.

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AI DISCLAIMER: AI was used heavily in this assignment, as when I prompted the script for the Mock Trial, I also had Microsoft Copilot format the research it did into a professionally written blog post detailing the things mentioned in the script and expanding upon them properly.