ABSTRACT
The code, in effect, extended the limitations imposed upon slaves in Mississippi's Slave Code for the purposes of "freedom." Restrictions upon the freedpersons' ownership of property, their right to sue or be sued and to bring charges in the court system, the legality of marriage, the right to bear arms and peaceably assemble, as well as so-called "apprenticeship" of the children of the newly freed slaves. 2
DEFINING FREEDOM
The Mississippi codes were not only the first, but also the most severe. Among those restrictions put into place which ultimately evoked the not yet distant spectre of slavery was a newly-instituted "pass" restriction, which required all blacks, regardless of their status prior to the proclamation, to carry on their persons written certification that they were duly employed. Freedpersons were limited in the type of work they could legally accept-in order to simplify matters for their former owners-and would forfeit wages if they left their place of employment prior to the end of the labor contract, as well as be subject to arrest for "vagrancy." The penalty for vagrancy was, in some cases, "involuntary plantation labor," with the freedperson's employer being granted preference for her or his unpaid "hire." In the case of the freedperson being remanded to the employer, fines for vagrancy, if any, were to be deducted from the freedperson' s salary; otherwise, the freedperson ' s labor would be granted to whomever elected to pay the fine. Thus, as has been pointed out, the "former masters of the unfree attempt[ed] to retain as much of their former dominance as possible," and freedom in Mississippi comprised an unappealingly familiar landscape. As race had previously been a condition of slavery, it now acted at once to cast a shadow over the delineation of freedom. It has been suggested that, because of the intense trauma suffered by former slaveholders, who had been plunged without sufficient prelude into a world that they could
scarcely imagine, the former slaveholders perhaps merely sought to offer the freedpersons some final protection by dint of legislation such as the slave codes. In any event, because of the angry northern response to such codes, references to race were specifically deleted in the majority of southern codes by the end of 1866, although the racial imbalance in cases brought for vagrancy and labor contract violations would seem to indicate that the spirit of the codes prevailed.3
