The civilized state of Alabama, which is now preparing to disfranchise the Negro, declared that “stubborn and refractory servants, and servants who loiter away their time,” were to be treated as vagrants, fined fifty dollars and “in default of payment might be hired out at public auction for a period of six months.”[2] Thus the Thirteenth Amendment did not destroy the auction block.
Florida declared that “it shall not be lawful for any Negro or person of color to own, use, or keep any bowie knife, dirk, sword or fire arms or ammunition of any kind” without license, to be granted only upon the recommendation of two “respectable” white men. For violating this law the Negro was to stand in the pillory for one hour and then be whipped with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.[3] South Carolina, always bold to reveal its purpose, declared that “no person of color shall pursue the practice, art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic, shopkeeper or any other employment besides that of husbandry or that of a servant under contract for labor”[4] without a license, which was good for one year only; and she supplemented this with the following:
“That a person of color, who is in the employment of a master engaged in husbandry, shall not have the license to sell any corn, rice, peas, wheat or other grain, any flour, cotton, fodder, hay, bacon, fresh meat of any kind or any other product of a farm, without written permission of such master.”[5]
Louisiana, which has recently outlawed the Negro by Constitutional enactment, declared:
“Every adult freedman or woman shall furnish themselves with a comfortable home and visible means of support within twenty days after the passage of this act!”[6]
Failing to do so, such persons were to be hired out at public auction for the rest of the year.
Let it be borne in mind that these laws were not enactments of a distant and forgotten past. They were the deliberate enactments of that period for the purpose of nullifying the Thirteenth Amendment.
Of this period Mr. Justice Miller in rendering the decision in the Slaughter House Cases said:
“The process of restoring to their proper relations with the Federal Government and with the other states those which had sided with the rebellion, undertaken under the proclamation of President Johnson in 1865, and before the assembling of Congress, developed the fact that, notwithstanding the formal recognition by those states of the abolition of slavery, the condition of the slave race would, without further protection of the Federal Government, be almost as bad as it was before. Among the first acts of legislation adopted by several of the states in the legislative bodies which claimed to be in their normal relations with the Federal Government, were laws which imposed upon the colored race onerous disabilities and burdens, and curtailed their rights in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property to such an extent that their freedom was of little value, while they had lost their protection which they had received from their former owners from motives both of interest and humanity.”[7]
This is what happened to the Negro when the South was left alone to deal with him and when he was voteless.