Yes, and they generally were prosperous, successful businesspeople because of it.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Civil War is that Americans tend to view it like the end of World War II: Fighting ends, slaves are liberated, everyone goes home and has a lot of kids to celebrate. And that's not even accurate about World War II.

After the Civil War, former slaveholders were indeed forced to give up chattel slavery, but as Eric Foner has repeatedly written, they used every legal ─ and even some extra-legal ─ way to re-establish de facto slavery under a different name. It's no wonder that one of Foner's biggest works is called Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.

After slavery, freed slaves faced the essential needs that all humans have: Clothing, food, shelter, etc. They needed to be employed and paid to get those needs, but many lacked even the most basic skills beyond farming. That meant they were essentially trapped on the farm.

The efforts of the federal Freedmen's Bureau and other land redistribution agencies meant that some blacks were granted land of their own, but through chronic under-funding, terrorist actions and local government malice, even these landowners faced monumental hurdles.

A free black man could choose his employer, but he was trapped by what the socialists and communists would later call "wage slavery." He might have the right to move freely, but he frequently lacked the ability to do so. That's what Jim Crow was all about; it was a system designed not just to restrict voting rights, but to roll back the clock and reinstitute slavery in all but name.

A man might be paid a salary and be provided clothing, shelter and food by his employer. The employer could deduct the cost of that clothing, shelter and food from his wage, leaving him with little left over. As reconstruction began to buckle in the 1870s under the pressure of terrorism and domestic political resistance, there were few people the free black worker could turn to.

Furthermore, there was no national, organized system to create the free labor market that existed in the North. In the South, plantations and farms tended to involve yearlong contracts or other structured arrangements that limited free labor. In the 1870s, as the Republican Party moved away from its strong support of free labor nationwide, the politics of race became much more prominent, and by the time of the 1876 election and the compromise that ended Reconstruction, things have been locked down for the next 40 years ─ until the labor demand of the WWI industrial boom draws black workers north in a big way.

Follow-up question: Were there any slave owners who tried to illegally sell their newly freed slaves to countries that still had slavery?

As a follow up, where there any slaves who remained working the plantations under the same land owners.

Were there any practices in the North that resembled slavery enough that they were legally banned by the Emancipation Proclamation?