HISTORY
Why an 1864 Newspaper Compared Black Codes to Anti-Witchcraft Laws
Examining a historical political analysis of unjust laws
Society is held together not just by formal laws and policies but by a patchwork of social norms. We’re reminded of that every time we examine a period of vast social change when the lines regarding acceptable behavior are blurred. For instance, on July 21st of 1864, Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez, a Haitian-descendent Creole man who printed this country’s first black-owned newspaper, L’Union, published the first edition of The New Orleans Tribune in French and English — “a new paper devoted to the principles” that were “defended by the Union.” In the first essay, entitled “Is the Black Code Still in Force,” the author exposed the injustice of enforcing racist laws, given the cultural change fostered by the Civil War, drawing a direct comparison to the use of Witchcraft Laws in New England to persecute women. Let’s consider the merits of their analysis.
What happens when a society is more devoted to law and order than to justice, the 1864 article written by editors of The New Orleans Tribune asks us to consider. “There are persons, in whom reverence for established law amounts to a disease, who would conscientiously believe that a judge called upon to decide a case under the…
