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chapter 9 Reconstruction: The Making and Unmaking of a Revolution
mandated strict obedience to white employers and set work hours, usually sunup to 1865–1877
sundown. Although the codes allowed freedpeople to legalize their marriages, own
property, make contracts, and access the courts, their aim was to perpetuate a slave-
like labor force in conditions of freedom: a kind of neo-slavery. Vagrancy provisions
were especially oppressive. Individuals without labor contracts who were unable to
prove that they were employed risked fines, imprisonment, and forced labor, as did
those who left a job before a contract ended or who were unruly or simply lost. In
Mississippi, freedpeople were prohibited from renting urban property, helping to
ensure that they would stay on plantations and work in agriculture. In Florida, break-
ing a labor contract often resulted in physical punishment, such as a whipping, or
being hired out for a year to a planter. As one southern white pointedly observed in
November 1865, the purpose behind black codes and vagrancy laws was to “teach the
negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected
by our white laws.” 19
Black codes also permitted the courts to order apprenticeships that removed chil-
dren from black families and bound them to white employers, often without their par-
ents’ or guardians’ consent. In Adeline Brown v. State (1865), the Maryland Court of
Appeals upheld the state’s black apprentice law. Two years later, however, the case In
re Turner (1867) overturned the law as unconstitutional because its educational provi-
sions for black youths were different from those for white youths.

The Hope of Education
To operate as free and independent men and women, former slaves — more than 90
percent of whom were illiterate at the moment of emancipation — recognized that
they had to learn to read and write, and they did so eagerly. Some began their school-
ing in the Union military or in contraband camps, where they were sometimes taught
by former slaves, such as Susie King Taylor, or by northern black women, such as Char-
lotte Forten, who went to the Sea Islands to teach. After the war, many makeshift class-
rooms grew into permanent institutions. On St. Helena Island, so many teachers were
from Pennsylvania that the school was named the Penn School, and it expanded to
accommodate 1,700 students on a campus that served black children into the 1940s.
In Hampton, Virginia, where thousands of contrabands set up their own community
soon after the Civil War began, the teacher was a free black woman named Mary S.
Peake. Under the sponsorship of the AMA, she began her school under a tree later
known as the Emancipation Oak. After she died of tuberculosis, General Benjamin
Butler stepped in to build the Butler School for Negro Children, again with the assis-
tance of the AMA. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who before the war had lectured on
behalf of abolition and black education, captured the excitement and sense of indepen-
dence that came with achieving literacy. In Harper’s 1872 poem “Learning to Read,”
the narrator, an elderly freeperson, is overjoyed by the prospect of literacy: “So I got a
pair of glasses,/And straight to work I went,/And never stopped till I could read/The

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