Denying blacks landownership took care of the threat of subsistence farming, but black labor also had to be “induced” back to the cotton plantations. The South worked quickly to turn freedom into a legal technicality as opposed to an experienced economic reality. The black codes and compulsory work contracts took care of that by mandating constant and unrelenting work and punishing resisters through vagrancy laws.65 Work contracts forced blacks to stay on the plantation, and a contract breach, usually enforced through monetary damages, was punishable by
