up to the employer, creating a system which virtually defined slavery itself. Since blacks were required to be employed, this meant that they could be held in slave-like conditions to white employers.In Mississippi and elsewhere, vagrancy laws were another tool used by southern whites to maintain power over free blacks. In Mississippi these laws defined any black not having employment, meeting with other blacks or whites unlawfully, or being intimately involved with a member of the opposite race as vagrants. Consequently, they could then be fined and/or jailed. These laws also allowed for any free Negro who could not pay his fine to be hired out to any white man who was willing to pay the debt. This set up a system in which a free black was confined to working for a white employer who could dictate control over most of their lives, or be declared a vagrant and then hired out into a similar position. Without black suffrage, free blacks had no way of changing these laws, which could keep them in a perpetual state of servitude. Blacks were forced to rely entirely on national republican legislation to protect their rights, which could be negated through legal jargon and loopholes at the state level. Consequently, blacks lives were changed little in the years immediately following the war from the ones immediately preceding it. ...
