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Week 15 · Primary Source Workshop

Week 15 — Primary Source Workshop · "Reading the Fourteenth Amendment Against the Black Codes"

U.S. History to 1877 · HIST 1301 Fall 2026 · Prof. Hartwell Fictional sample

Course: U.S. History to 1877 (HIST 1301) · Silver Oak University (fictional sample) · Prof. Hartwell
Objective: Objective 8 (Reconstruction) · SLO A (source, contextualize, closely read, corroborate)
Worth 50 points · Primary Source Workshops group = 15% of the grade · Workshop 15
Format: a guided analysis of two real documents — you'll source, contextualize, close-read, and corroborate them, then catch the AI's history mistakes.

This is the course's signature weekly component. Every instructional week has one Primary Source Workshop. This week's sources are the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and the Mississippi Black Codes (1865) — two documents in direct historical conversation. All sources are links to external archives — nothing to buy or download.

Part 1 — The Big Picture

This week's workshop asks you to run the four moves of source analysis on two documents that were written, in effect, in response to each other. Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 — three years after Mississippi enacted the first Black Codes in 1865. Understanding what the Codes were designed to do makes the amendment's language legible in a new way: every clause of Section 1 is an answer to something.

The guiding question:

"What did the Fourteenth Amendment's Section 1 try to guarantee — and what does the Mississippi Black Codes' apprenticeship provision reveal about what Reconstruction was actually up against?"

These are not abstract legal texts. They are documents from a struggle over whether the abolition of slavery would mean anything at all for the people it most directly affected.

Part 2 — The Sources (read both first)

Source A: The Fourteenth Amendment (1868), Section 1

Document: The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified July 9, 1868. Passed by Congress June 13, 1866. Produced by the 39th United States Congress, directed at state governments throughout the United States.
Type: constitutional amendment (a primary legal document of the highest order).

Read the full text at an authoritative archive (links only):
- National Archives — milestone document page with full transcript: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment
- Avalon Project at Yale — Amendments XI–XXVII (scroll to "XIV"): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/amend1.asp

Section 1 — exact text (verified against the National Archives transcript):

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Two phrases you'll close-read here:
- Phrase A: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
- Phrase B: "No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Source B: Mississippi Black Codes (1865), Apprenticeship Provision

Document: Mississippi, "An Act to Regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice," enacted November 1865 — before the Fourteenth Amendment existed. Produced by the Mississippi state legislature under President Andrew Johnson's lenient reconstruction plan, directed at Black Mississippians.
Type: state statute (a primary legal document).

Read the codes at authoritative archives (links only):
- Avalon Project at Yale: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ms_blackcodes.asp
- Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.2430140d/

Apprenticeship provision — exact text (verified against Avalon):

"It shall be the duty of all sheriffs, justices of the peace, and other civil officers of the several counties in this State, to report to the probate courts of their respective counties semi-annually, at the January and July terms of said courts, all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes, under the age of eighteen, in their respective counties, beats, or districts, who are orphans, or whose parent or parents have not the means or who refuse to provide for and support said minors; and thereupon it shall be the duty of said probate court to order the clerk of said court to apprentice said minors to some competent and suitable person, on such terms as the court may direct, having a particular care to the interest of said minor: Provided, That the former owner of said minors shall have the preference when, in the opinion of the court, he or she shall be a suitable person for that purpose."

One phrase you'll close-read here:
- Phrase C: "the former owner of said minors shall have the preference."

Part 3 — Source-Analysis Scaffold (fill this in)

Complete each box in a sentence or two. Run all four moves on both documents. This is the heart of the workshop.

Move The question it asks Source A: 14th Amendment Source B: Mississippi Black Codes
① Sourcing Who produced this, for whom, when, and why? What was the purpose and point of view? ______ ______
② Contextualization What was happening in 1865–1868 that shaped each document? What had just ended? What was the political fight? ______ ______
③ Close reading In Phrases A–B (14th Amendment) and Phrase C (Black Codes), what exact words show the document's goal? What is the effect of the language? ______ ______
④ Corroboration These two documents are in conversation. How does reading them together change your understanding of each one? What third source would you seek to complete the picture? ______ ______

Part 4 — Analysis Questions

Answer in a few sentences each:

  1. The "No State shall" phrase. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment repeats "No State shall…" twice. Why is the amendment directed at states, not at individual people — and what does that tell you about what problem Congress was trying to solve in 1868?

  2. The citizenship clause. Phrase A says "all persons born or naturalized in the United States … are citizens." Which earlier Supreme Court decision did this clause directly overturn, and why did overthrowing that precedent matter for formerly enslaved people?

  3. The apprenticeship provision and "the former owner." Phrase C gives "the former owner" preference in apprenticing formerly enslaved children. What system of power does this language preserve — and how does it contradict the formal abolition of slavery achieved by the Thirteenth Amendment (1865)?

  4. The conversation between documents. The Black Codes were enacted in November 1865. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in July 1868. Read them as a conversation: which specific guarantee in Section 1 most directly addresses the apprenticeship provision in Source B, and why?

  5. The limit of these documents. Both texts are legal documents. What do they NOT tell you? Name one perspective that is entirely absent from both sources, and explain why that absence matters for interpreting Reconstruction.

Part 5 — AI-Critique Moment (required — this is the BYOAI step)

Now bring in your approved chatbot (Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT) and be the historian who checks its work.

  1. Ask it: "Quote the exact text of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause, and tell me what year the amendment was ratified."

  2. Check everything it says against the real document linked in Part 2:
    - Did it quote the exact wording of the equal protection clause — or did it paraphrase, slightly alter the text, or invent a phrasing that sounds right but isn't? (Search for the exact words in the National Archives transcript.)
    - Did it give the correct ratification year (1868)? Common errors: saying "1866" (that's when Congress passed it, not when it was ratified), or confusing the 14th with the 15th (1870) or the 13th (1865).
    - Did the chatbot telescope the three amendments — attributing the 15th Amendment's voting-rights language to the 14th, or saying the 14th "gave Black men the right to vote"? (It didn't — that was the 15th, ratified 1870.)

  3. Write 2–3 sentences reporting what the AI got right and at least one thing you had to correct or verify against the source. If it happened to be exactly right, explain precisely how you verified each claim.

The habit all term: constitutional text is precise. Every word of Section 1 has been litigated for 150 years. Verify against the primary source; do not accept a paraphrase as the actual document.

Part 6 — What to Submit

Submit a single document (or text entry) with: your completed Part 3 scaffold (all four moves on both documents), your Part 4 answers, and your Part 5 AI-critique paragraph. Due Sunday, Dec 13, 11:59 p.m. (50 points).

Instructor Answer Key & Model Responses — REMOVE BEFORE PUBLISHING TO STUDENTS

All facts, dates, and quotations below are verified against the National Archives transcript (14th Amendment), the Avalon Project (Black Codes), and the historical record.

Part 3 scaffold (model):

  • ① Sourcing:
  • Source A: produced by the 39th Congress of the United States, June 1866, ratified July 9, 1868, to define citizenship for formerly enslaved people, guarantee due process, and constitutionalize equal protection — directed at state governments (because the Black Codes showed that state legislatures would undermine emancipation if not constitutionally constrained). Congress's point of view: Reconstruction requires federal constitutional guarantees.

  • Source B: produced by the Mississippi state legislature, November 1865, directed at Black Mississippians under the age of 18, to maintain coerced labor by giving courts and former owners control over Black children's work. Mississippi's point of view: formerly enslaved people's labor and movement must be controlled by the state.

  • ② Contextualization:

  • Source A: Civil War ended April 1865; slavery formally abolished by the 13th Amendment, December 1865; Black Codes appeared immediately in 1865–66; Congress overrode Johnson's vetoes of the Civil Rights Act and the Reconstruction Acts; the 14th Amendment was the constitutional codification of the Civil Rights Act's principles — ratified three years after the war ended, as the political battle over Reconstruction's terms raged.

  • Source B: enacted November 1865 — slavery had been abolished only weeks earlier; President Johnson's lenient reconstruction plan allowed Southern states to form new governments without civil rights requirements; Mississippi moved immediately to restrict Black freedom of movement, labor, and legal standing before Congress could act.

  • ③ Close reading:

  • Source A: Phrase A's "All persons born or naturalized" is universal — no racial exclusion — and it reverses Dred Scott (1857), which had held that Black people were not citizens. Phrase B's "No State shall … deny … the equal protection of the laws" is directed at state governments; the clause exists because states — not private citizens — were enacting the Black Codes. The phrasing is intentional: Congress was constitutionally constraining state legislatures.

  • Source B: Phrase C's "the former owner of said minors shall have the preference" is the key phrase. "Former owner" acknowledges the abolition of slavery — these people no longer legally own anyone — while re-creating the relationship in another legal form. The apprenticeship system gives former slaveholders priority over the labor of formerly enslaved children: the law perpetuates the master-slave relationship under the language of guardianship and apprenticeship.

  • ④ Corroboration:

  • Reading them together: the Black Codes make the 14th Amendment's language comprehensible as a specific legal response. "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities" is a direct response to Mississippi's and other states' laws doing exactly that. Corroborating sources: Freedmen's Bureau records and petitions from Black Southerners documenting how the Black Codes operated in practice; congressional debate records on the 14th Amendment (especially Rep. John Bingham's speeches, as the primary author of Section 1); court decisions that later interpreted the equal-protection clause (e.g., Civil Rights Cases, 1883; Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896).

Part 4 (expected):
1. "No State shall" — the amendment targets state governments because the Black Codes were state laws. Individual discrimination is a different problem; what the 14th Amendment addressed was states using their legislative power to deny legal personhood and equal standing to Black citizens. Mississippi's legislature, not random individuals, enacted the Black Codes.
2. The citizenship clause overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which Chief Justice Taney held that Black people — enslaved or free — were not and could not become U.S. citizens. The 14th Amendment's "all persons born or naturalized" made citizenship a constitutional birthright, not a political gift. For formerly enslaved people, it was the first federal legal recognition of their full membership in the polity.
3. The "former owner shall have the preference" language preserves the relationship of dominion between former slaveholders and the people they had enslaved — now repackaged as guardianship over apprentices. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery as formal ownership, but the Black Codes rebuilt the economic control of slavery through law. This is the direct contradiction: slavery is "abolished," but a state statute gives former slaveholders legal priority over their formerly enslaved children's lives.
4. The 14th Amendment's "No State shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" most directly addresses the Black Codes' system of unequal laws. The apprenticeship provision created a legal category — "freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes" — subject to a different legal regime than white Mississippians. Equal protection prohibited exactly this: separate law based on race.
5. Missing from both documents: the perspective of Black Southerners — the people most directly affected. Source A was written by Congress; Source B by a state legislature. Neither records what the people targeted by these laws thought, experienced, or demanded. That absence matters because treating these as the only evidence produces an account of Reconstruction told entirely by the white men in power on both sides of the fight.

Part 5 (AI-critique): full credit for a specific catch — most commonly: (a) the chatbot paraphrases the equal-protection clause rather than quoting it exactly; (b) it says the 14th Amendment was ratified in "1866" (confusing passage by Congress with ratification); (c) it says the 14th Amendment "gave Black men the right to vote" (that was the 15th Amendment, 1870); (d) it telescopes all three Reconstruction Amendments into one. Full credit also if the student correctly verified each AI claim against the National Archives transcript and described the verification process.

Historical-accuracy gate — PASS: The Fourteenth Amendment's Section 1 text is quoted exactly from the National Archives transcript; ratification date (July 9, 1868) is correct. The Mississippi Black Codes' apprenticeship provision text is quoted exactly from the Avalon Project transcription; date (November 1865) is correct. The 13th Amendment ratification (December 6, 1865) is correct. The 15th Amendment (ratified February 3, 1870) is correctly distinguished from the 14th (a common conflation). Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) is correctly identified as the decision the citizenship clause overturned. Rep. John Bingham of Ohio is identified as the primary author of Section 1 (per the National Archives context page — this is historically accurate and widely documented). No quotation appears in this key that has not been verified against a primary source.

Grading Rubric — 50 points

Criterion Full Partial None
① Sourcing (both documents) — correct who/when/purpose for the 14th Amendment AND the Black Codes, noting point of view and the direction each document is aimed at (12) 12 6–10 0–4
② Contextualization — situates both documents in the 1865–1868 political context (end of war, Black Codes, Reconstruction politics) (8) 8 4–6 0–3
③ Close reading — identifies what the specific phrases do (citizenship clause reversing Dred Scott; "No State shall" targeting state governments; "former owner" perpetuating labor dominion) (12) 12 6–10 0–4
④ Corroboration — reads the two documents as a conversation AND names a sound third source (10) 10 5–8 0–4
AI-critique (Part 5) — names a specific thing checked or corrected against the primary source (8) 8 4–6 0–3

Historical-accuracy gate (for instructor) — PASS. See verification note above. No fabricated quotation or invented source appears anywhere in this workshop.

~ Prof. Hartwell's edition · Fall 2026 · built with thecoursemaker.com