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Surveying the state literature on the Civil War and Reconstruction , Randolph B. Campbell observed that Texas’s versions of the infamous black codes of 1865–1866 have been defended as models of discretion compared to those adopted in other states, but the very existence of such legislation indicates that Texans did not mean to accord blacks equality before the law.1 Although increasing attention has been paid to Texas history during the post–Civil War years, little has focused upon the passage of the black codes, what they portended for the Reconstruction status of the Lone Star State, and whether these enactments really embodied a spirit of judiciousness toward the recently emancipated slaves. Scholars of Texas history have alluded to and briefly mentioned the substance of the 1866 black code, but they have not analyzed it in detail or included in their discussions the various other statutes that reinforced the code and additionally limited black rights and equality. Until the 1980s, with few exceptions, writers on the Texas experience believed the Texas laws to be rather mild and more favorably disposed toward blacks than those of any other southern state. Recently, Texas historians have revised previous interpretations of the code, but their discussions have tended to be brief and to follow past ideas with a slightly different twist, blaming the army and the Freedmen’s Bureau. Because the 1866 Texas black code has been viewed as an anomaly, it is necessary to set the laws in context and analyze them. First, by briefly scrutinizing past perspectives on the code, we can ascertain how Texas Reconstruction historiography has perceived them. Second, through a short discussion of the political and economic situation at the time the Texas legislature passed these statutes, the reasons for their passage become clear. Finally, a dissection of the laws themselves and of how they attempted to regulate and coerce black Texans demonstrates that the state’s politicians Seven “ALL THE VILE PASSIONS” The Texas Black Code of 1866 “All the Vile Passions” 135 intended to circumscribe severely the freedmen’s constitutional rights and maintain a stable laboring force. The southern black codes were a series of laws directly or indirectly applied to the former slaves and passed by the states of the defeated Confederacy . Enacted between the close of the Civil War in 1865 and the imposition of Congressional Reconstruction in early 1867, the statutes dealt with labor and contracts, apprenticeship, vagrancy, enticement, domestic relations, property holding, court testimony, litigation procedures, criminal penalties, convict leasing, and numerous other aspects of the freedpeople ’s lives. Designed to restrain and control the free blacks, they penalized, fined, and imprisoned them for the slightest transgression.2 Nineteenth-century Texas writers, some of whom had been participants in the events they wrote about, found the black codes necessary. Charles Stewart, a former Texas congressman, claimed that the 1866 convention and subsequent legislature followed presidential and congressional requirements, which included providing for the “future education of the negroes; for the equal preservation of their lives, liberty and property, and for the bestowal of other rights and privileges upon them.” Oran M. Roberts believed that emancipation “made it incumbent upon the Legislature to endeavor to regulate the conduct and control of a large body of persons, who had heretofore been provided for, taken care of, and governed for the most part by the owners.”3 A majority of Texas historians have viewed the black codes in a similar vein. Charles W. Ramsdell saw the laws as “harsh and stringent,” but thought them “necessary both for the good conduct and for the protection of the negroes for whom alone [they were] intended.” Seth Shepard McKay considered them merely “toned down” versions of antebellum legislation. T. R. Fehrenbach declared the code essential, since blacks “delighted in taking no orders, a perfectly human reaction after years of forced labor.” Ernest Wallace wrote that the legislature saw the codes as “imperative ” and that they did not “offend the radicals.” John C. McGraw found the codes “absolutely necessary” because of the “total irresponsibility and depravity” of blacks in 1866.4 Joe B. Frantz, in his brief bicentennial history of the state, stated that the 1866 Constitution as “a whole treated blacks more generously than the fundamental law of any other state of the recent Confederacy,” but the labor code was a “subterfuge for keeping the black in some sort of peonage.” Like Frantz, Nora E. Owens insists that the 1866 Texas constitution “gave more specific...

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