In 1865 the Mississippi state legislature passed a series of related laws known as the Black Code. These laws, written within months of the conclusion of the Civil War and styled after the state’s antebellum slave code, represented the first effort by white Mississippians to define what freedom and citizenship would mean to recently freed slaves and others of African descent. As the Black Code of Mississippi reveals, the initial legal definition that whites offered suggests that they intended the condition of freedom for Blacks to differ little from enslavement. The Mississippi Black Code was the most extreme example of similar codes that sought to nullify the freedom of formerly enslaved people and to define their citizenship as virtual enslavement. The laws consequently offer an example of the attitudes of whites toward formerly enslaved people and other people of African descent; they also testify to the persistence of those attitudes across time. Finally, the very existence of the Black Code proved to the United States Congress that southern states needed a more thoroughgoing reconstruction than that called for by President Andrew Johnson. A year after the passage of the Black Code, Congress assumed authority over Reconstruction in the southern states.