The best thing you can do if you're interested in this at an introductory level is to stop reading this right now and go to the Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project so you can read exactly what the slaves themselves thought. These were living, breathing human beings with varied experiences, lives and conditions. There were millions of liberated slaves spread across a vast geographical and cultural range, and their stories vary tremendously from place to place.

The news of liberation spread with the advancing Union soldiers, both following the Emancipation Proclamation and the final surrender of the various Confederate armies. There was a great deal of difference in the experience of slaves liberated while the war was still being fought and those liberated after the end of hostilities.

Generally, however, if you were young, you got up and left. The sheer novelty of freedom, the ability to simply leave and walk to a different place without anyone's permission was a huge attraction to the newly liberated. If they were young and in good health, they also had the prospect of good employment. As Rivana-Williams Boynton, who was 15 when he was liberated from a Florida plantation, explained: "they (Union soldiers) took some of the others for refugees and some of the slaves volunteered and went off with them."

Furthermore, most slaves desperately wanted to reconnect with family or friends forcefully separated. Wouldn't you, after all, want to go out and seek your family, whom you haven't seen in months or years?

If you were older or disabled, prospects were darker. Older slaves were typically well-established and accustomed to a particular way of doing things. They also had less chance of reconnecting with family who might be decades removed. As John Love explained from Texas, "De plantations all growd up in weeds and all de young slaves gone, and de ones what stayed was de oldest and faithfullest."

After the end of hostilities and the start of Reconstruction, the Union made significant efforts to improve the lives of the liberated slaves, both through organized governmental programs and through what today we call non-governmental organizations. Both government programs (through the Freedmen's Bureau) and NGOs established free schools for black children, they redistributed land and property, and they ensured free and open elections.

The effect of these programs was limited, however, as they were not adequately funded and not deployed in large enough number. Furthermore, white terrorism and insurrection crippled these programs in the later years of Reconstruction, ultimately leading to the defeat of the programs and the implementation of Jim Crow laws.

While some liberated slaves were able to use federal and private programs to improve their situation and create a narrow black middle class, most liberated slaves found themselves in deep poverty, living an agricultural existence for low wages in the South. It wasn't until World War I, and the vast demand for industrial (and other) labor, that the situation began to change in a significant way.

Follow up question: was there any violent backlash against slaves as a result of the outcome of the war, similar to the partition of India?? Were slaves systematically murdered to prevent them getting freedom, or was it not so organised (Or not at all)?

You'd get picked up by the Sherrif for crimes like not having a job or fabricated petty theft. The Sherrif and the court had personal financial incentive to find you guilty and sell your labor to a private company, usually coal or iron mines. The thirteenth amendment only protects you from slavery until you are convicted of a crime.

Since the mine only had you for a short period of time, usually less than two years, they had no incentive to protect your health. You'd be toiling deep underground with improper ventilation in a stream of human waste for most of each day. If you weren't killed by a cave in, it was common to die from sickness and overwork. You would be less than property, at least property is invested in and maintained. The mining companies only incentive was to extract as much labor as possible as quickly as possible.

There wasn't any guarantee that you'd be released once your sentence was served. But if you did manage to get out, you'd better find a job fast lest you get picked up again. Other common accusations leading to the mines were petty theft and bigamy, with false accusation being common for both.

all sourced from Douglas A. Blackmon's "Slavery by Another Name".

Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery, is a comprehensive and award winning book on this topic by Leon F. Litwack. Union soldiers quickly and effectively enforced the immediate end of slavery. People were able to find work of various kinds, though virtually no one was willing to do it where they were formerly held as slaves. Private organizations set up schools and the federal government set up the Freedmen's Bureau to help.

I would also add to the very good responses that the response to your question is also very geographically specific. In my area of speciality, the Sea Islands of South Carolina, many of the enslaved workers were happy to stay on their home plantations in freedom because their masters had fled inland during the war, and they were living under the protection of the U.S. army as early as November 1861. It should also be noted that the many enslaved workers fled plantations in the lowcountry to seek shelter on the Sea Islands. The scholar Ted Rosengarten suggest in Tombee, Portrait of a Planter, that former slaves/freedpeople felt deeply attached to the land upon which they had worked for generations, and were reluctant to leave it, especially under the aforementioned special conditions. Finally, the scholar Greg Downs in After Appomattox and his digital project with Scott Nesbit, Mapping Occupation [http://mappingoccupation.org/map/static/about.html], argues that the CW peace and freedom had to be constantly negotiated and was defended/supported by the U.S. Army well into "Reconstruction." So highly specific to regions and local conditions.

Here's a post I made a long time ago about that exact day, if this is helpful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14pu6d/what_exactly_happened_when_the_slaves_were/