More than a million African Americans were refugees, homeless, separated from family during years of slavery. Governments in many places ceased to exist. The new labor arrangements of tenant farming and sharecropping were born out of this necessity. Laborers who had everything they needed to farm (except the land) became tenant farmers. Sharecroppers usually had to plant specific crops required by the landowner. This system of labor lasted in some parts of the south for a century, involving a majority of landless black and white farmers in many parts of the South. Though sharecropping reduced many freedmen back to circumstances very similar to slavery, there were laborers who worked without any wages at all, legally. For many years after the Civil War, Southern states routinely convicted poor African Americans and some whites of vagrancy or other crimes, and then sentenced them to prolonged periods of forced labor. <span>It may come as no surprise that criminal populations multiplied in several states by as much as ten times between 1865 and the turn of the century. Inmates were big business. What kind of crime might lead someone to be sentenced to convict labor? </span>
One of the most significant changes in the South after the war was that they were no longer allowed to have slaves under legal law. However, there still were loopholes to this law (i.e.- Jim Crow Laws).
