After Emancipation
The day immediately following a natural disaster a weird phenomenon occurs where the survivors just walk around dazed, looking like zombies. Their whole world has been turned upside down and nobody seems to know exactly what to do; and so, they just wander. The combination of the Civil War and emancipation had a similar effect on the South. Four years of brutal fighting had blasted the South’s major cities into piles of rubble. Thousands were homeless or unemployed. Soldiers were amputated limbs begged for money on the street corners. But the biggest shock came as four million emancipated slaves came to realize that they were no longer under their masters’ control.
Emancipation left both whites and blacks trying to navigate with this new world order. Some slave owners were honest and told their former slaves that they were now free. Others tried to hide the truth and used intimidation and violence to keep their slaves on the plantation.
Now free to move about without those hated passes, African-Americans walked off the plantations. Some headed to the cities in search of jobs that didn’t involve field labor. Others went in search of mothers, fathers, spouses, and children that had been sold off to other masters. Many just wandered because they could.
Freedmen put ads in newspapers trying to locate their loved ones or walked for miles chasing rumors. Some of these reunion stories had happy endings but most did not. Some families had been separated by hundreds of miles and trying to locate them in the days before the internet was nearly impossible. Sometimes these reunions came with a mixed bag, finding their spouse after years of separation was bittersweet when they found out that they had remarried and had a new family now.
Challenging the Old Order
In a society built on the idea of white supremacy, the worst part for many whites was when blacks stood up to their old masters. The once docile and obedient slave suddenly became ‘sassy’ and ‘insolent’. One woman told her former mistress that if she wanted dinner, she could cook it herself. Some freedmen left the plantation, but not before taking the silver, silks, and furniture. After all, their hard work had paid for these luxuries.
Richmond, like nearly all major Southern cities, was in complete ruins after the war.
Newspaper ads were a common way of trying to track down loved ones who had been separated by slavery.
The Freedmen's Bureau
Even before the war ended, leaders were wrestling with a massive question: what do we do about four million people about to be freed from slavery? As the Union armies pushed deeper South, the old system fell apart. General William Tecumseh Sherman came up with an interesting solution during his March to the Sea - one that would both punish defeated rebels and help freed people at the same time. His Special Field Order 15 took land that plantation owners had abandoned and set it aside for freed black families. This wasn't a small gesture - the land stretched 30 miles wide and 250 miles long, from Charleston all the way to Pensacola, Florida.
Congress stepped in too, creating the Freedmen's Bureau in spring 1865. Think of it as an early version of a disaster relief agency - they helped freed people find jobs, reunite families, settle legal disputes, and establish schools. They even created temporary communities, like refugee camps, to house people who had nowhere else to go. The Freedman’s Bureau tried to give land to freed people through a variety of ways. Some land would come from confiscated property, but most was carved from Indian Territory (what's now Oklahoma). The Homestead Act of 1862 had promised 40 acres to anyone willing to farm it, and now former slaves could apply too.
For many African Americans, owning land meant real freedom. But with the best land already claimed by planters, they had to settle where they could - on vacant government land or up in the mountains. Most refused to grow cotton, for obvious reasons, choosing instead to raise corn and hogs. This kind of farming didn’t promise wealth, but at least they were working for themselves.
'Emancipation'
Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Making Freedom Work
Being free was one thing, surviving in this new world was another. Most slaves were illiterate, had no skills other than manual labor, and were flat broke. The first concern facing freedmen was finding a job. Many freed people actively resisted returning to field labor and domestic service, seeing these jobs as too closely tied to their years in bondage. This wasn't just about avoiding hard work - it was about asserting their new freedom and dignity. Some with skills took up trades like blacksmithing or carpentry, while others tried to start small businesses or work as teachers in the new freedmen's schools.
Women particularly fought against becoming domestic servants, refusing to live in white households or care for white children as they had been forced to do under slavery. As one freed woman put it when offered a job as a cook in her former master's house, "I've cooked enough for white folks under the lash. Now I'm going to cook for myself." But with few other opportunities available and increasing pressure from the Black Codes, many eventually had to take these jobs to survive.
Even then, they often tried to set their own terms - demanding payment up front, refusing to live in their employer's homes, or insisting on specific days off. These small acts of resistance showed how freed people tried to reshape traditional labor roles, even when economic reality forced them back into familiar work.
Just days after General Lee surrendered at Appomattox in April, 1865, abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. In his speech, Douglass explained why African-American men wanted the right to vote:
"It is said that we are ignorant; admit it. But if we know enough to be hung, we know enough to vote. If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag for the government, he knows enough to vote ....What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice."
-Frederick Douglass
The Black Codes: Slavery Part 2
As thousands of freed people left the plantations, Plantation owners panicked about losing their free workforce. Their solution? The Black Codes - laws designed to find a way around emancipation and return the South back to a slave society. Mississippi and South Carolina led the way, passing the harshest codes in late 1865. In Mississippi, blacks had to carry written proof they had a job or face arrest. South Carolina went further - they could only work as farmers or servants unless they paid a yearly tax that most could never afford.
The codes controlled every aspect of African American life. Want to travel to the next county? You needed written permission. Looking to rent a house in Louisiana? You needed your employer's okay. In Florida, if you didn't sign a year-long work contract by New Year's Day, you could be arrested for vagrancy. Those who couldn't pay the fine - and most couldn't - would be hired out to whoever paid it, often their former master.
These laws kept African Americans poor and powerless. By making it illegal for white employers to compete for black workers, wages stayed low. Year-long contracts trapped African-American workers in bad situations, and employers could withhold pay if they claimed the work wasn't good enough. One Georgia planter didn't even try to hide what was happening, bragging that "the free negro is a slave under another name."
Black codes stomping on civil rights.
Freedman Schools
Having been denied the right to an education for so long one of the first things that freedmen did was to establish schools where adults and children sat side by side learning to spell and read. For freed people, education wasn't just about learning - it was about breaking free from slavery's mental chains. They set up schools wherever they could find space, and the locations themselves tell us a lot about this transformation. Think about this: some of these makeshift classrooms were in old slave auction houses. The very buildings where people had once been sold as property were now filled with freed men, women, and children learning their letters. That's the kind of historical irony that really makes you stop and think.
Up until the civil war, spending taxpayer money on public education in the southern states had been opposed by the planter aristocracy. Why did they have to spend their hard-earned money on someone else’s kids? Now the doors to public education were being thrown open across the South including dozens of universities and colleges. Many blacks began to attend all-white universities such as the University of South Carolina. However, many white students and teachers just quit rather than sit beside people they saw as inferiors.
Black and White teachers (mostly women) flooded into the South to set up schools for children regardless of their ethnic background. Their efforts paid off, by 1891 illiteracy among blacks had fallen to 58% and whites to 31%.
But clearly there were many who were very much opposed to the changes sweeping through the New South. Violence broke out across the South as mobs attacked teachers and burned down schoolhouses. One Louisiana teacher was even shot and killed outside of her schoolhouse. Robert Toombs, former Confederate leader and U.S. Senator from Georgia had this to say about the new freedmen schools: “We are opposed to the education of the Negro, not because we desire to enslave him, but because we do not desire to be enslaved by him." If you look closely, you can see the fear that was in the hearts of many ex-confederates, that African-Americans would turn the tables and enslave their former masters. Whether or not Toombs really believed this we'll never know. But one thing is clear many whites in the 1860s didn't think racial equality and harmony was possible.
Why It Matters
The end of slavery didn’t mean the end of struggle for African Americans—it was just the beginning of a new fight for survival and equality. After centuries of forced labor, most freedmen had no land, no money, and no formal education. Many were forced back into working the same fields they had just been freed from, trapped by unfair contracts and harsh Black Codes designed to keep them powerless. Despite these obstacles, freedmen showed incredible resilience, building schools, reuniting families, and pushing for political rights in the face of violence.
What happened after emancipation still shapes America today. The Freedmen’s Bureau, the 14th and 15th Amendments, and the push for public education planted seeds of change that would later fuel the civil rights movement. But freedom wouldn't come easily. What followed was a harsh backlash against emancipation —Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, and Klan violence—reveals just how deeply racism was entrenched and how hard it was to break. The struggles of freedmen remind us that freedom isn’t just about breaking chains—it’s about having the tools and opportunities to build a better life.
Test Page