In the South, the governments resisted giving full ownership of land to freed slaves. Many blacks had to become sharecroppers on the plantations where they had previously been slaves.
For labor, the Radical Republicans attempted to put a land reform through Congress, promising, 40 acres and a mule, to newly-freed blacks in the South, which was rejected by moderate elements as socialistic. This failure left blacks without an economic base and was one of the key contributing factors to the development of sharecropping and segregation pay.