By the winter of 1865–66, Southern legislatures consisting of former secessionists had begun passing “black codes,” new, racially based laws that effectively continued slavery by way of indentures, sharecropping, and other forms of service. In South Carolina, children whose parents were charged with failing to teach them “habits of industry and honesty” were taken from their families and placed with white families as apprentices in positions of unpaid labor.16 Slavery seemed like a monster that, each time it was decapitated, grew a new head. And then rose the Ku Klux Klan,
