NARRATOR
In Louisiana, black farmers had leased over ten thousand acres from the Freedmen's Bureau, believing they would soon own them outright. Marshall Twitchell and other Freedmen's Bureau agents delivered a different message: No matter what they'd heard, no forty acres and a mule was coming from this government.

TUNNELL
This is what Presidential Reconstruction is coming to mean. It's telling the freedmen that the government is not going to pamper you. The government is not going to give you any land. You have a hard row ahead of you. Get used to it.

NARRATOR
"Freedom from slavery," Twitchell informed black laborers, "is not freedom from work." His words reflected worries shared by whites North and South: that freed African Americans would not work, and would refuse to go back to the cotton fields.

FONER
What would then happen to the cotton crop of the South? Northern industry needs that cotton. It's still the largest export of the United States. To earn foreign money you need to export cotton. Northerners were not willing to let blacks stop growing cotton.

TUNNELL
Freedmen, I think, probably would have chosen to duck out of the cotton economy all together. You can't eat cotton. For freedmen, becoming an independent landowner is a dream. That's their version of the American Dream. But that kind of independence for freedmen, Southern planters don't want, the Freedmen's Bureau doesn't want it. Many Northerners in Congress don't want it.

NARRATOR
Across Louisiana, white planters now sat down to draw up labor contracts with the men they used to own.

AYERS
No matter what color your skin is, no matter what your status before the war had been, it's a new order for everybody. No matter what happens politically, you've got to figure out how you're going to feed yourself and your family. That's the back beat. That's the rhythm on which everything else depends.

WALKER
The freed people understand that they're going have to work, but they do not want someone riding around on a horse with a whip curled on his shoulder, as the overseer had done during slavery. And they also do not want to work for low wages.

FAUST
For many white Southerners, negotiating with slaves seemed unimaginable. Because in the very notion of negotiation is an assumption of some kind of equality. And for many white Southerners, they don't have anything to pay them with, because they themselves are on the verge of desperation.

NARRATOR
"There is now nothing between me and the nigger but the dollar, the almighty dollar," said one South Carolina planter, " and I shall make out of him the most I can at the least expense."

TUNNELL
They want submissive, obedient employees. I think in their heart of hearts they want a system that is as close to slavery as possible.

NARRATOR
Black laborers who insisted on better wages and working conditions were regularly met with threats and violence. Vigilantes lynched whole families, and used the bullwhip on men and women as they had in slavery days. In 1865, more than two thousand black men women and children were reported murdered in Louisiana alone.

WALKER
The violence in the South was a way to reestablish white supremacy.

TUNNELL
These gangs of whites pick out the guy who's trying to save his money, who's trying to get ahead. The man who is an inspiration to other black people in the community -- he's the one that gets murdered. It amounts to systematic culling of alpha males from the black community.

NARRATOR
The southern legal system became an instrument of intimidation. Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Florida passed laws that virtually prohibited freedmen from any work except as field hands. The laws were called "Black Codes." The aim was slavery without the chain.

BLIGHT
The Black Codes were laws passed to control and restrict and constrain the lives of the freed people, essentially rendering them bondsmen again under law.

NARRATOR
Some states made it illegal for freedmen to handle weapons and restricted them from buying or renting land. Black children could be seized from poor families and forced to work in the fields. If a black man had no job, he could be jailed and auctioned to a planter for his labor.

FONER
They make a travesty of the freedom that African Americans have acquired. They are so far from any notion of fairness or freedom that even northerners, who are not egalitarians, say these laws are unacceptable. And so northern Republicans are faced with a dilemma. They don't want to have a big fight with the president, but to accept the idea that Johnson's policy is a success, and accept the Black Codes, they feel means giving up the victory in the Civil War.

NARRATOR
To Louisiana's black veterans, one freedman offered this advice: "I would say to every colored soldier -- bring your gun home."