In the lower South the majority of slaves lived and worked on cotton plantations. Most of these plantations had fifty or fewer slaves, although the largest plantations have several hundred. Cotton was by far the leading cash crop, but slaves also raised rice, corn, sugarcane, and tobacco.
So slaves did a lot of heavy farm work and were household servants.
Many former salves expected the federal government to give them a certain amount of land as compensation for all the work they had done during the slave era. During Reconstruction, however, the conflict over labor resulted in the sharecropping system, in which black families would rent small plots of land in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year.
this is what I got from Google-
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott decision that the Missouri Compromise's prohibition of slavery in territories was unconstitutional, an increasingly diverse body of opponents of slavery rallied around the Republican Party.
