Aside from the awkward goodbyes what did the slaves do after slavery was abolished and they were given their freedom?
Presumably a whole bunch of people (how many?) suddenly found themselves homeless and jobless a few thousand miles from home. Did they generally try to keep working where they were with wages or what?
Many continued to exist as de facto slaves, doing the same work that they had been doing before their legal emancipation. Former slaves would continue to be exploited via sharecropping for years. I suppose they weren’t so much slaves as serfs, but really there wasn’t much of a difference.
You mean, aside from not having families broken up by being sold and shit. The lot of serfs may be pretty shitty, but it’s a fair step up from chattel slavery.
My point is that they were still basically slaves. I agree that sharecropping was a step up.
There were about four million slaves counted in the 1860 Census.
As for “miles from home . . . .” Africa probably was not “home” to most of those folks at that point, if that’s what you mean by home. For some of them, “home” might have been Plantation A that had sold them to Plantation B. Not sure how eager they’d be to get back to A. At the time of emancipation, I would imagine (no cite) many or most would have considered wherever they were at the time to be home, more or less, in those generally less mobile days (I’m basing this on an assumption that most were living within a few miles of where they’d been born/grown up).
As noted, in practice most of them stayed in place, doing what they’d been doing (agriculture, domestic service), but with a theoretical ability (though little real leverage) to demand to be paid for it. They continued to have little real economic or political power, and continued to depend upon “support” (hardly largesse) from the whites who sort-of employed them through the sharecropping/tenant farmer/agricultural laborer system.
They basically did what everyone else did: find work on farms sharecropping, opened their own businesses, or headed west or to the cities to seek something better, among many other things.
Not much political power at the national level, but quite a few blacks were elected to the state legislatures in the South. Keep in mind that he balance of power between the states and federal government was significantly different in the 19th century.
For a few years during Reconstruction, blacks had significant political power, even if not full equality with whites. It wasn’t until the about 1890, with the rise of the Jim Crow Laws, that blacks were effectively shut out of the political process.
Consider P.B.S.Pinchback:
When was the next time something like that happened?
In the Charleston area, slaves often remained close by the plantation where they were born. Most still worked at the plantation if the owners could afford to pay them anything. Their ancestors were all buried there, the church they grew up around was still there. Many never left and are still there to this very day. The slaves also viewed the plantation owners as family and generally maintained contact.
The black families in the south usually have far deeper roots than the whites and can trace back many generations. The white families who can brag of confederate relations are much fewer. I have been in several old homes which have photographs on the staircase, in chronological order, tracing relatives, one by one, back to the civil war (most of them lived that same house). Those are uncommon.
Much more common are the black communities. Adams Run, Hugee, Cainhoy, Bethara are built and populated by descendants of slaves still living on the same land. The nearby plantations are mostly gone, cut up and sold off. The family names of Harleston, Greene, Legare, Washington are steeped in history.
On of the common misunderstandings about the slave states is the intermingling of Anglo, African, Native American and Creole in blood, common history and mutual empathy. What came from vile and racist beginnings (of English design) has gradually changed into respect and understanding, especially in outlying areas. Country folk are always the nicest, and those in the areas I mentioned are among the best you could meet.
If you want a more graceful explanation, read “Slaves in the Family”, by Edward Ball. His family owned hundreds of slaves on 13 plantations in the Charleston area.
Of course, there were also waves of migration into Chicago, Detroit and industrial centers after successive agricultural and financial collapses in the ruined post-war South.
Some were part of the Westward Expansion. Not many, but some. Claims were free to all males 21 and older. (What happened afterwards was up to the settler, of course.)
When you said that some went there, they mostly went but most of them started to move north and some stayed and worked out in the farms like they did when they were slaves.
Don’t try to blame the English for slavery. Slavery was banned in the UK and in the British colonies many decades before the US, and without a bloody civil war to force it.
Weren’t the (ex)slaves awarded an amount of land too?
Yes. The (ex)slaves that wanted land got it but they couldn’t get as much as whites could.
40 acres and a mule, just as offered by the British to slaves who could escape and move to Canada. 
Wikipedia says:
“In 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade, and slavery itself was abolished in the British West Indies in two stages between 1834 and 1838”
The incarceration rates for Blacks skyrocketed. Of course going from slavery to jail is a lot like from the frying pan to the fire, but slavery was often much better than being locked behind bars. Why did this happen? As slaves they had ‘value’. After freedom their ‘value’ was less. Also consider that many were broke and poorly equipped for freedom. If you had to steal or starve, which would you chose? Then there was the law being used against former slaves just for spite.
Well, without having the person you’re referring to come back and clarify, I would presume he means the plantation system. That was definitely perfected (in part) by the English and other Old World powers in their Caribbean colonies on sugar cane plantations and such before really being perfected in the thirteen colonies. There’s a slower evolution for slavery in the Atlantic seaboard colonies than there were in the Caribbean colonies, which were home to very massive slave plantations raising expensive cash crops fairly early on. I don’t know if that’s what he meant, though.
But the civil war point isn’t really a good comparison. The persons in the British Empire who benefited from slavery were both small in number in relation to the whole and did not get to seat MPs, so they had no franchise and thus emancipating their slaves was no real political feat in comparison. In the U.S. they controlled half the Senate and typically 35-40% of the House. They couldn’t be easily dealt with via fiat from some distant Parliament.
By and large though, most slaves were only trained to be field hands. That meant their best bet for employment was staying where they were. They were poor and mostly illiterate with low-skilled job training. But there was still a significant change, it wasn’t easy nor was it common right at first but they could now leave. They could homestead in the West, go to a city and look for factory work, many new opportunities that were absolutely never open to them were now “theoretically” open to them (more than theory for a small number.)
Poor unskilled laborers in the 19th and early 20th century typically had a pretty terrible lot (the scrip payment system coal miners were subjected to for example has similarities to sharecropping in how it creates an almost captive labor force), and ex-slaves even more so due to institutional racism–but it was immeasurably better than chattel slavery.
Most ex-slaves actually remained in the South, the major waves of immigration to Northern cities came a good while later. Even after those waves, a disproportionate number of blacks today (primarily descendants of slaves) live in the Old Confederacy. [The Old CSA States represent 29% of the country’s population but have 44% of the black population. Of the top 10 states with highest % black populations all but two, Delaware and Maryland, are former CSA states.]
Yeah, I imagine a bit more management HR skills were called for, if after the Civil War when you starved or whipped your workers, you likely could wake up one morning to find them all gone, and you had to actually persuade new ones to come work for you. Probably that made a bit of a difference in the working conditions.
They were awarded land and then had it yanked away from them.
Are you an American, by the way? Just curious.
A lot of former slaves headed west. There were the Buffalo Soldiers and a lot of black men made a living moving cattle.