There are a few things that freedmen and women did after the end of the war. Agricultural production had to go on, so many went back to work as hired hands on plantations and in more urban areas. Many were also supported by the Freedmen's Bureau, which provided education and support for newly freed slaves.

The majority, however, became involved in sharecropping. Sharecropping allowed them to "retain a minimal amount of control over their own labor and that of their children on both a daily and seasonal basis. Furthermore, the sharecropping system enabled mothers to divide their time between field- and housework in a way that reflected a family’s needs. The system also removed wives and daughters from the reach of lacivious white supervisors. Here then were tangible benefits of freedom that could not be reckoned in financial terms." Jones, Jacqueline (2009-12-24). Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women , Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (p. 45). Sharecropping had both negative and positive outcomes for the formerly enslaved, and did serve to keep many African Americans in the south in poverty for a very long time.

During the [Great Migration](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American) of the early 20th century, millions left the south to head to work in northern cities. Many young men ended up working in factories in places like Detroit. Young women, some as young as 12 or 13, were sent to places like New York and Washington, DC to work as domestics. Many sent the majority of their earnings home to their families in the rural south, and these same young women became some of the earliest supporters of the Civil Rights Movement.

For more information about Reconstruction, a good overview of this time period is provided in Clayborne Carson et al. The Struggle for Freedom: A History of African Americans. Elizabeth Clark-Lewis's Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration is a fantastic mix of oral and documentary history.

There's a fairly new book out where a journalist traces the history of his family's plantation and the family of a some of the slaves. It's pretty interesting. He talks about blacks being forced to take their owner's last names as a form of social control, so that the whites knew who was supposed to be working for who. They would blacklist anyone who tried to get out of the sharecropping system and wouldn't have to compete for labor b/c they wouldn't hire each other's former slaves. It wasn't until the FDR and federal road projects came through that blacks could really get jobs that weren't share cropping in his area.

Here's a link ot the book: http://tomlinsonhill.com/