Folks,
If you’re looking for information on Northern Black Codes, you won’t find it on Google until item 65, after 7 pages of returns of 10 items to the page.
Every reference prior to that details the evil South and its Jim Crow laws, which didn’t come into being until 1890. We just can’t have the benevolent North, the freer of slaves, sullied with their sordid laws of selling free blacks into slavery for fines levied for staying in the Northern States too long.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the first blatant attack upon Southern property rights and used slavery as their oh so pious example for their ‘indignation’. It would have made no difference if the law had prohibited Southerners from transporting their goods into the territories in anything but a Studebaker or Conestoga wagon.
What it really boiled down to was, they didn’t want blacks in the North, period, unless they were Northern owned slaves. The damnedyankees made a killing off the slave trade with the biggest slave auction being in New York City. It was their ships that plied the ports of Africa and brought the slaves to the Colonies and later the US after chattel slavery was approved by the King’s Court in 1652. Prior to that date, ‘slaves’ were indentured servants and were freed after, usually, 7 years service.
That is the condition of which many of our White ancestors arrived in the Colonies.
Let’s understand something right now. Indentured servitude was the Visa or Master Card of the day. It was not slavery! Those who had no, or very little, funds signed an agreement to serve someone for a certain period of time to pay their passage. That was their indenture document.
Let’s take the fight to the damnedyankee NAACP and demand the repeal of the Black Codes of the North.
The Southern Black Codes were not implemented by Southerners or Confederates for they didn’t have the right to vote unless they had signed the damnedyankee ‘loyalty oath’. They were brought South by the carpetbaggers because they didn’t want niggers anywhere near them in either rights or accommodations.
Deo Vindice,
Dennis Joyce
Chairman
Federation of States
A proud member of the Confederate Alliance and staunch advocate of a restored Christian CSA.
"A meddling Yankee is God's worse creation, he cannot run his own affairs correctly, but he is constantly interfering in the affairs of others, and he is always ready to repent of everyone's sin, but his own." -- M. D. Hall, a prominent North Carolina gentleman in the 1850's
Black Codes in Northern USA
The Black Codes were laws passed on the state and local level in the United States to restrict the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans, particularly former slaves.
Black Codes in Northern USA – History
The history of Black Codes is complex and lengthy. Black Codes are most commonly associated with the laws adopted in the southern states after the American Civil War until the beginning of Reconstruction to regulate the freedoms of former slaves. Contrary to popular misconception though, the Black Codes did not begin in 1865. Rather they develop over the span of half a century or more and date to the early 19th century in some northern states.
Black Codes in Northern USA - Early Black Codes in the Midwest
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 organized new territories in the American Midwest with a stipulation that prohibited slavery's expansion there:
"There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted".
This landmark bill would ensure that Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin would enter the union as free states. In the early 19th century, however, white laborers residing in this region and many other northern states began to fear competition from both the slave labor system to their south and also from freed slaves who relocated to these states to pursue work. Known by historians as Negrophobia, these prejudices among white residents of the Midwest prompted a call for statutory regulations and restrictions on free blacks who resided in or moved through their territory. In several cases these restrictions amounted to an outright ban on blacks from owning property, contracting, or taking up residence in certain states.
Ohio's legislature adopted one of the first immigration laws against freedmen in 1804:
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Ohio, that from and after the first day of June next, no black or mulatto person, shall be permitted to settle or reside in this state, unless he or she shall first produce a fair certificate from some court with the United States, of his or her actual freedom, which certificate shall be attested by the clerk of said court, and the seal thereof annexed thereto, by the said clerk.
The law also established a public registry system for all blacks residing in Ohio before 1804, prohibited white settlers from contracting and hiring blacks without certifications, and imposed heavy fines for violators of its provisions, both white and black. In 1807 the law was extended to require black immigrants to place a bond with the clerk of their county of residence and banned blacks from testifying in court or bringing suit against white persons.
The territorial legislature of Illinois followed suit in 1813 by enacting an outright prohibition against free black settlers within its borders:
Be it enacted by the Legislative Council and House of Representatives of the Illinois Territory that it shall not be lawful for any free Negro or mulatto to migrate in this territory, and every free Negro or mulatto who shall come into this Territory contrary to this act shall and may be apprehended and carried by an citizen before some justice of the peace of the county where he shall be taken; which Justice is hereby authorized to examine, and order to leave the Territory every such free Negro or mulatto.
The Illinois law imposed severe penalties against violators of this law. Blacks who remained within Illinois borders for longer than 15 days were to be "carried before a justice of the peace who shall order him or her to be whipped on his or her bare back not exceeding thirty-nine stripes nor less than twenty-five stripes." Like Ohio, free blacks already residing in Illinois were required to register their residence, status, and personal records with their county of residence.
Black Codes in Northern USA - The Expansion of Black Codes: 1830-1860
As the abolitionist movement gained steam and escape programs for slaves such as the Underground Railroad expanded, so did the backlash of Negrophobia among white laborers in the north. During his 1830's visit to the United States Alexis de Tocqueville reacted in disgust at the discriminatory practices northern society imposed against free blacks. He described the inequalities they faced in detail:
"It is true that in the North of the Union marriages may be legally contracted between Negroes and whites; but public opinion would stigmatize as infamous a man who should connect himself with a Negress, and it would be difficult to cite a single instance of such a union. The electoral franchise has been conferred upon the Negroes in almost all the states in which slavery has been abolished, but if they come forward to vote, their lives are in danger. If oppressed, they may bring an action at law, but they will find none but whites among their judges; and although they may legally serve as jurors, prejudice repels them from that office. The same schools do not receive the children of the black and of the European. In the theaters gold cannot procure a seat for the servile race beside their former masters; in the hospitals they lie apart; and although they are allowed to invoke the same God as the whites, it must be at a different altar and in their own churches, with their own clergy. The gates of heaven are not closed against them, but their inferiority is continued to the very confines of the other world. When the Negro dies, his bones are cast aside, and the distinction of condition prevails even in the equality of death. Thus the Negro is free, but he can share neither the rights, nor the pleasures, nor the labor, nor the afflictions, nor the tomb of him whose equal he has been declared to be; and he cannot meet him upon fair terms in life or in death." (Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter 18)[1]
Within a few short years of Tocqueville's visit many northern states began to institutionalize these practices in Black Code statutes like those found in Ohio.
Indiana's miscegenation statute, adopted in 1845, typifies these provisions:
No Person of color, Negro or mulatto, of either sex, shall be joined in marriage with any white person, male or female, in this state.
Oregon Territory adopted the "Lash Law," one of the most extreme Black Codes of the antebellum period. The law denied property rights to blacks and ordered all free blacks to immediately vacate the territory. Those who did not were to be whipped publicly every six months that they remained, hence the law's name. [2]
In several states the Black Codes were either incorporated into or required by their State Constitutions, many of which were rewritten in the 1840's. Article 13 of Indiana's 1851 Constitution stated that "No Negro or Mulatto shall come into, or settle in, the State, after the adoption of this Constitution" and ordered the legislature to appropriate funds for the colonization of free blacks abroad.
