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.