Why did freed slaves remain on the plantations they had worked upon as slaves?

Answer 1

One reason is that it was their home. Perhaps they had lived all their life there, and didn't want to leave. Their family, extended family, might be there. Not all slave owners were mean to their slaves, and sometimes there could be genuine affection and regard, both ways, from the master for his former property, and from the former slaves for their one-time owner. With the war over and the slaves freed, everybody still needed to make a living and feed themselves. So now the slaves might be paid, but they had to buy their own food and clothes now, or maybe they got a place to live and food and were paid a little less. Other plantation owners divided the land into plots and let each slave or slave family farm a plot, with the landowner supplying the seed and paying the taxes on the land in return for a "share" (usually 1/3) of the crop grown by the ex-slave, in a system called sharecropping. Many slaves did leave, just because they could, just to go somewhere, anywhere, and see something of the wider world. But some of those came back, and told of the hard life in town with no job, no job skills other than agricultural laboring, plenty of ex-slaves wanting any job that was available, and the difficulty of paying for food and lodging without paying work or money. So maybe, all in all, the former slaves reasoned that they were better off just to stay where they were. The first large-scale migration of southern blacks to the cities of the north came about fifty years after the Civil War ended, at the time of World War One, when southern blacks heard of good-paying jobs, with industry in high gear for war production, in places like Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, New York. Some even found some of those jobs when they got north, but many just found poverty in a different place.