e to improve their unhappy condition. In this there is no
tendency to migrate but an urgent need to escape undesirable conditions.
In fact, one of the American Negroes' greatest shortcomings is that they
are not sufficiently pioneering. Statistics show that the whites have more
inclination to move from State to State than the Negro. To prove this
assertion,[51] Professor William O. Scroggs has shown that, in 1910, 16.6
per cent of the Negroes had moved to some other State than that in which
they were born, while during the same period 22.4 per cent of the whites
had done the same.[52]

The South, however, was not disposed to look at the vagrancy of the
ex-slaves so philosophically. That section had been devastated by war and
to rebuild these waste places reliable labor was necessary. Legislatures
of the slave States, therefore, immediately after the close of the war,
granted the Negro nominal freedom but enacted measures of vagrancy and
labor so as to reduce the Negro again almost to the status of a slave.
White magistrates were given wide discretion in adjudging Negroes
vagrants.[53] Negroes had to sign contracts to work. If without what was
considered a just cause the Negro left the employ of a planter, the former
could be arrested and forced to work and in some sections with ball and
chain. If the employer did not care to take him back he could be hired out
by the county or confined in jail. Mississippi, Louisiana and South
Carolina had further drastic features. By local ordinance in Louisiana
every Negro had to be in the service of some white person, and by special
laws of South Carolina and Mississippi the Negro became subject to a
master almost in the same sense in which he was prior to emancipation.[54]
These laws, of course, convinced the government of the United States that
the South had not yet decided to let slavery go and for that reason
military rule and Congressional Reconstruction followed. In this respect
the South did itself a great injury, for many of the provisions of the
black codes, especially the vagrancy laws, were unnecessary. Most Negroes
soon realized that freedom did not mean relief from responsibility and
they quickly settled down to work after a rather protracted and exciting
holiday.[55]

During the last year of and immediately after the Civil War there set in
another movement, not of a large number of Negroes but of the intelligent
class who had during years of residence in the North enjoy