Excerpt from Thirty Years a Slave Describing events in 1865; published in 1897; reprinted on Documenting the American South (Web site)

Reminiscences from a long-time slave

"We knew it was our right to be free … yet they still held us.…"

Four million slaves were freed by the American Civil War (1861–65), but their bondage did not end the instant Confederate troops surrendered in April 1865. In some pockets of the rural South, white men continued to keep African Americans as slaves for months after the war until Union troops liberated, or freed, them. Other plantation owners simply hired their former slaves to do their old jobs for meager pay, until the Freedmen's Bureau, a federal agency created to help ex-slaves, stepped in and required better terms of employment. Still other landowners created "sharecropping" arrangements with ex-slaves: The whites...