Slavery in All but Its Name

This paper argues that the political and racial conflicts of the Reconstruction era produced enduring structural patterns that continue to shape American politics, law, and geography. Drawing on primary statutes, legal history, and contemporary policy analysis, it traces three interlocking legacies of the post–Civil War failure to secure Black civil and political rights: local resistance to federal civil-rights enforcement, spatial control over where Black Americans could live and move, and constitutional ambiguity about the reach of federal power. Through close reading of the Virginia Vagrancy Act of 1866 and Southern Black Codes, alongside the Reconstruction Amendments and key Supreme Court decisions such as the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank, the paper shows how local officials translated the language of slavery into vagrancy, convict leasing, and zoning regimes that survived emancipation in everything but name. It then follows these patterns into the twentieth century through Progressive-era carceral labor, mid-century highway routing, and suburban opposition to mass transit, before turning to twenty-first-century debates over policing and Black Lives Matter. The paper concludes that contemporary conflicts over race, federalism, and civil-rights enforcement are not departures from a stable constitutional order but the latest chapter in Reconstruction’s unfinished work.