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====After the Civil War====
The conclusion to the Civil War in 1865 led to conditions that transformed over four million people into citizens. Before the passage of the 14th amendment these formerly enslaved persons lacked a political definition. If they were not enslaved, what were they? And if they were citizens, were they equal? In order to resolve this question, the country needed new laws. Because of the complicated question of proportional representation, things became thorny. The paradox was that making peoples of African descent citizens meant increasing the representation of the former Confederate states from three-fifths of every Black person to five-fifths. If that declaration of citizenship came without voting rights for the newly emancipated Blacks it would be subjecting the country to the same predicament that it had before the war: a dictatorship of whites over Blacks. But the opposite was also true. The South, it was thought, would never agree to being readmitted on the basis of Black citizenship and Voting Rights.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, it must be remembered, the South had instituted the Black Codes. These were laws that simply stripped newly emancipated Blacks of the privileges of merely living their lives. Passed in each former Confederate state, these laws generally varied but most of them prohibited Black people from participating in markets of all kinds, including the labor market on their own terms; they sought to control Black people’s movement, outlawing loitering and vagrancy; they instituted forms of unequal civic identities, for instance prohibiting Black people from testifying against whites, but not the reverse; and they developed draconian penalties for violating such codes which included imprisonment.
