It seems like a stupid question but I was thinking about it and in 1865 it doesn't seem reasonable that the same day a law was put in place it would go into effect. werent their slave owner who simply refused to give up slaves? If the south relied so much on slave labor how were they able to deal with sudden loss of that cheap labor.
I have another related question, the 13th Amendment also states that slavery can be used legally as "punishment for a crime". Has this ever been used? Why was it put in the Amendment?
I'm actually reading James McPherson's Battlecry of Freedom at the moment, and the distinction between "slave" and "wage laborer" in the Reconstruction Era South was largely, as abolitionists complained, semantic. Yes, former slaves were "freed." However, a wave of new laws limited this freedom to essentially leave them where they'd been before the war.
The infamous "Black Codes" restricted African Americans' power throughout the South, both in their relationship with the government and with whites. Voting limits maliciously targeted new black voters with confusing rules, even pertaining to the set-up of ballot boxes to intentionally confuse them.
Your average freed plantation slave would be offered a contract by their previous owner, an agreement which included their year's wage and a mention of fees (rent, food, supplies, etc.) which would be expanded upon at random, often with intent to pay nothing or very little. Freed slaves who agreed to these arrangements would essentially become serfs, tied to the land and forbidden to leave without express consent from the planter, their de facto owner. Whites were permitted, even encouraged, to beat and otherwise terrorize their not-slaves, basically to remind them of their place. Whites had feared race riots and rebellions since the first slaves were imported. This in part explains the horrific treatment of captured black North soldiers; the worst and oldest Southern nightmare was armed blacks.
Lincoln, a moderate, was uninterested in having full-blown Reconstruction which would uproot the social fabric of the ultraconservative South, and handed over much responsibility (power) to long-established Southern families, ironically many of the same who had been pro-Confederacy only a little while before. I can't express the disgust many vocal abolitionists screamed, even during preliminary "test" Reconstruction in the parts of Louisiana the Union had taken before the war had concluded.
However, a freed slave who left the plantation might be still be rounded up by groups of lynch-happy whites endowed with special permission (or not) to gather "wandering" blacks who might cause trouble, an irony which did not escape the laments of progressive papers. In fact, many progressives would call Reconstruction an utter disaster because so little had actually changed excepting the 600,000+ military deaths and countless civilian ones.
CivilWar.org offers excellent visualizations of the cost of life, who served, and so on.
tl;dr A plantation owner did not have to change much except on paper, and many understood that their power was not legitimately threatened; it was business as usual in this regard.