“Travel Ban” After Civil War: How Southern States Trapped Freed Slaves

Question: Were freed slaves free after the Civil War? Surely you sense that this is a trick question. You’re right. The answer is yes as a formality but no as a matter of experience.

Many freed slaves and their descendants, facing terror from the KKK and an oppressive labor system known as peonage, hired agents to get them out of states such as Georgia. By the late 1800s, this led to such an exodus of exploitable labor that states began to tax the transaction between the African Americans and their agents.

As explained by Prof. David Bernstein, these “freedom workers” were called emigrant agents. He explains that these agents “played a key role in encouraging and financing African-American migration within the United States. Because many rural African-Americans were too poor to go very far without aid and because they lacked ready access to information about opportunities in distant places," they had little choice but to rely on labor recruiters.”

Take a look at how this law was ironically phrased in Georgia in 1898:

“An act to levy and collect a tax for the support of the state government and the public institutions; for educational purposes in instructing children in the elementary branches of an English education only; to pay the interest on the public debt, and to pay maimed Confederate soldiers and widows of Confederate soldiers such amounts as are allowed them by law for each of the fiscal years 1899 and 1900; to prescribe what persons, professions, and property are liable to taxation….”

When R.A. Williams was arrested for failing to pay the annual $500 tax, he challenged the law. 

The Supreme Court denied his challenge to the law. He argued that it has the effect of restricting the right of travel of African Americans. One Justice agreed (Justice John Harlan)—all the others viewed it as a legitimate tax, concluding: “Nor was the imposition in violation of § 2 of article 4, as there was no discrimination between the citizens of other states and the citizens of Georgia.”

This law and court ruling acted like a travel ban on African Americans who wanted to come to the North in search of jobs and freedom.