What happened to labor on Southern plantations right after the war?
Ed Ayers: Perhaps the most fundamental thing that had to be decided the day that slavery ended was what form would labor take now. Slavery is fundamentally a form of extracting labor from unwilling people. Now what’s going to happen? You can’t wait to find out. This is not an abstract question. The day that freedom comes, it’s springtime. It’s time to be plowing the fields. It’s time to be putting in the seed. It’s time to be clearing the ditches. If you don’t do it now, it’s going to be too late. Soon that hot Southern sun’s going to come baking down, and if those plants haven’t started, they’re never going to start. And if they don’t grow, there’s nothing to eat. So these are not just sort of things that people can sit around and decide later what they’re going to do… Black Southerners make one thing clear. They’re going to work, and they want to work as free people, which does not mean being put in a gang and presided over by a man on horseback with a whip. What they want is what
