I’m part of a class set. Please don’t take me from m13, please don’t write on me. I’m available on the website.
PHIA (PURPOSE, HISTOCIAL CONTEXT, INTENDED AUDIENCE, AUTHOR’S POINT OF VIEW) DOCUMENT ANALYSIS
ON THE DBQ PORTION OF THE AP EXAM, IN ORDER TO EARN FULL CREDIT FOR ANALYZING DOCUMENTS,
STUDENTS MUST INCLUDE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING FOR ALL OR ALL BUT ONE OF THE DOCUMENTS:
DOCUMENT
PURPOSE
HISTORICAL
CONTEXT









ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS USING COMPLETE SENTENCES IN YOUR NOTES NOTEBOOK.
What is the author trying to achieve?
What was the outcome associated with this document?
What kinds of outside information can you provide to promote understanding of this
document?
What does the document reveal about the history involved here?
To whom is this document addressed?
Does the audience influence what the author has to say? How?
What do you know about the author?
What kind of bias do you expect he/she to have? What kind of bias is actually present?
INTENDED
AUDIENCE
AUTHOR’S
POINT OF
VIEW
YOU MUST ANSWER ONE QUESTION FROM EACH OF THE FOUR CATEGORIES FOR EACH OF THE DOCUMENTS
USING COMPLETE SENTENCES IN YOUR COMPOSITION NOTEBOOK.
The Mississippi Black Codes (1865)
As Carl Schurz reported, after the Civil War whites in the South sought a system of race relations in which
African Americans would be clearly subordinate to whites and would constitute a readily accessible and
controllable workforce.
Immediately after the Civil War southern whites wrote or revised vagrancy laws and the old slave codes as a
means of establishing the system of race relations they wanted. Following is one of their most famous
attempts to codify race relations, the Black Codes passed by the Mississippi legislature.
The Mississippi codes gave blacks rights they had not had before and clearly acknowledged that chattel slavery
had ended. The codes recognized the right of African Americans to own property, though not in incorporated
towns or cities. (Before the Civil War there were black property owners in Mississippi and even a few black
slaveholders, but their legal standing was not clear.) The 1865 codes also recognized marriages among blacks
as legal.
Not all the southern states passed comprehensive Black Codes, and some codes were much less stringent than
those of Mississippi. South Carolina’s codes differed in that they restricted blacks to buying property in cities or
towns.
The creators of the codes drew their ideas from the world in which they lived. Slavery had just ended very
abruptly, and the ravages of war were ever present. The men who drafted these codes used the old slave codes
from the South, vagrancy laws from the North and the South, laws for former slaves in the British West Indies,
and antebellum laws for free blacks. They were also aware that most northern states had laws that
discriminated against African Americans and that very few northern states allowed African Americans to vote.
Most of these codes and similar measures were declared void by the Union army officials who were stationed
in the former Confederate states. Subsequently, during Reconstruction, the rights of African Americans were
greatly expanded.
Source: Excerpt from Laws of Mississippi, 1865, pp. 82ff.
I’m part of a class set. Please don’t take me from m13, please don’t write on me. I’m available on the website.
I’m part of a class set. Please don’t take me from m13, please don’t write on me. I’m available on the website.
3. MISSISSIPPI VAGRANT LAW
. . . All freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes in this State, over the age of eighteen years, found on the
second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business, or found unlawfully
assembling themselves together, either in the day or night time, and all white persons so assembling
themselves with freedmen, free negroes or mulattoes, or usually associating with freedmen, free negroes or
mulattoes, on terms of equality, or living in adultery or fornication with a freed woman, free negro or
mulatto, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in a sum not exceeding, in the
case of a freedman, free negro or mulatto, fifty dollars, and a white man two hundred dollars, and imprisoned
at the discretion of the court, the free negro not exceeding ten days, and the white man not exceeding six
months . . . .
The Civil Rights Act of 1866
When Congress reconvened in December 1865, it blocked President Johnson’s attempts to restore the South
quickly. It extended the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau over the president’s veto and passed another landmark
law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, again over the president’s veto. This act made African Americans citizens and
countered the 1857 Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court had declared that no African American
who was descended from a slave was or could ever be a citizen
Doubts about the constitutionality and permanence of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 prompted Congress to pass
the Fourteenth Amendment. Ratified in 1868, this amendment for the first time constitutionally defined
citizenship and some of the basic rights of citizenship; it also embraced the Republican program for
Reconstruction.
Source: Excerpt from U.S. Statutes at Large, 14 (1868), 27ff.
An Act to protect all Persons in the United States in their Civil Rights, and furnish the Means of their
Vindication.
SEC.2. And be it further enacted, That any person who, under color of any
law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, shall subject, or cause to be subjected, any inhabitant of any
State or Territory to the deprivation of any right secured or protected by this act, or to different
punishment, pains, or penalties on account of such person having at any time been held in a condition of
slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
convicted, or by reason of his color or race, than is prescribed for the punishment of white persons, shall be
deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and, on conviction, shall be punished by fine not exceeding one thousand
dollars, or imprisonment not exceeding one year, or both, in the discretion of the court.
I’m part of a class set. Please don’t take me from m13, please don’t write on me. I’m available on the website.