Mississippi enacted the first Black Code in the fall of 1865, and other states followed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller asserted that the codes did “but change the form of slavery,” but they were not a return to slavery. African Americans had civil rights—including contract rights—they did not possess under slavery: to marry, hold property, sue, and be sued. Yet the codes reminded both Northerners and freedpeople of a return to slavery because the most egregious of them—those in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas—defined black people as agricultural and domestic workers and their
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