Question: Immediate Fate of Freedmen after Emancipation

I'm not sure whether this goes in here or somewhere in chat/NP-chat.

What happened to freedmen in the immediate aftermath of the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 and the Thirteenth Amendment and similar legislation? How did they own property and gain income and find work? Was it simply a case of them working as "apprentices" (the proper euphemism for this stage of abolition) until they gained enough money to buy or rent homes for them and their families?
 
Well from what I had to learn about a black slave owner at least for African American History, apprenticeship was usually the only reliable way to gain any skills to make a career if you were a freedman, that or try to find work. Housing wise at least after the Civil War recently free slaves created communities around former plantations or moved possibly to other African American communities.
 
I read in Ar'n't I A Woman that a lot of the freed women got jobs at other plantations doing pretty much what they did as slaves. Apparently, their options were limited but it was psychologically a boost to work for somebody else. I assume the situation's the same for men.
 
In sharecropping, the farmer hiring the sharecropper usually also provided them with housing and farming tools. As opposed to tenant farming, where the tenant farmer only rents the land itself. So many freedmen and women likely would have been stuck doing the same sort of labor they were doing as slaves, except of course now with (small) wages, the ability to move to a better situation and freedom from being beaten or separated from their families.
 
During the war itself, with freedom moving along the country in lockstep with Union armies, a lot of the freedmen also ended up working for the military. They often left their homes for fear of reprisals (and the war in general) and ended up in the army's civilian labour pool. That was also why Union generaly took an active interest in settling them.
 
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