The usual charge that the Negro is naturally migratory is not true.  This impression is often received by persons who hear of the thousands of Negroes who move from one place to another from year to year because of the desire 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 enjoyed such advantages of contact and education as to make them desirable and useful as leaders in the Reconstruction of the South and the remaking of the race.  In their tirades against the Carpet-bag politicians who handled the Reconstruction situation so much to the dissatisfaction of the southern whites, historians often forget to mention also that a large number of the Negro leaders who participated in that drama were also natives or residents of Northern States.