crouch2007

@InCollection{ crouch2007,
	author = {Barry A. Crouch},
	title = {"All the Vile Passions": the {Texas Black Code of 1866}},
	pages = {134-158},
	editor = {Larry Madaras},
	booktitle = {Dance of Freedom: Texas African Americans during Reconstruction},
	address = {Austin},
	publisher = {University of Texas Press},
	year = 2007,
}

Crouch argues strongly against historians who have seen the Texas Black Codes as somehow more restrained or nondiscriminatory than other Southern states, or at least not much different from the Freedmen’s Bureau’s own labor regulations. “What we must realize about the black code is that the Texas legislators [of the Eleventh Legislature] did not require the army and the bureau as tutors. Former slaveholders and Confederate patriots understood antebellum history” (p. 149).

When seen in context, says Crouch, the revision of the penal code and the introduction of convict leasing from the Huntsville State Penitentiary at the same time as the other Black Codes added up to a concerted effort to control black labor for public works.

p. 146:

Finally, although few historians of Texas Reconstruction have commented on the ramifications of the practice, the Eleventh Legislature provided for the beginning of convict leasing, no doubt realizing that blacks would be sentenced to the penitentiary in droves. The legislators enacted a comprehensive law that concentrated on employing convicts to build railroads, dredge rivers, irrigate, mine, and labor in foundries. They divided the inmates into two classes; the first, comprised of those convicted of murder, arson, rape, horse stealing, burglary, perjury, and robbery, would labor inside the penitentiary. Those convicted of all other crimes would be employed outside the penitentiary on “works of public utility” directed by a Board of Public Labor.