Editor’s note: This is part of a continuing series of columns, stories and photos by Greenville County Historical Society examining the history of Greenville and the Upstate.
The Civil War may have ended slavery, but it did not settle what freedom would mean. In South Carolina, many of the same men who had held power before the war tried to define that freedom for themselves.
Within months of surrender, South Carolina’s legislature passed the Black Codes. These laws pushed freed people into year-long labor contracts, limited them mostly to farm work and domestic service unless they paid a heavy tax, treated leaving a job as vagrancy, and allowed courts to hire out convicted people. Slavery had been abolished, but the intent of the Black Codes was obvious: to recover as much control over Black labor as the law would permit…