that: “The social status of the citizens shall never be the subject of legislation.” Further national action to assure the newly freed slave equal rights as a citizen was taken in the first Civil Rights Act, passed over the President's veto in April, 1866. Meanwhile the various new governments attempted to handle the problem of the Negro—masterless, without land, wandering over the country. These legislative efforts are important as fixing an attitude toward the Negro's liberty that has influenced his status ever since.

The slave codes were obsolete; the few laws for free negroes were not applicable to the present conditions; most laws and codes were expressly for whites. The task of the law-makers was to express in the law the transition from slavery to citizenship; to regulate family life, morals and conduct; to give the ex-slave the right to hold property, the right to personal protection, and the right to testify in the courts, … to protect the whites in person and property from the lawless blacks. In general the laws relating to whites were extended to the blacks…. But one principle was never lost sight of, viz., that the races were unlike and unequal and should be kept separate…. The sources of these laws are found in the ante-bellum laws for free negroes, in the Northern and Southern vagrancy laws, in the freedmen's codes of the West Indies, in the Roman law of freed-men, and in pure theory to some extent, and to a great degree in the regulations for blacks made by the United States army and treasury officials in 1862–1865 and in the Freedmen's Bureau rules…. The laws were never in force in any of the States…. Since the downfall of the Reconstruction régime, the essential parts of this legislation have been re-enacted in the Southern States, especially the laws relating to the definition of race, to the separation in schools, et cetera….¹⁶

The spirit of these “Black Codes” is expressed as follows:

Almost every act, word, or gesture of the negro, not consonant with good taste and good manners, as well as good morals, was made a crime or misdemeanor for which

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