His successors in Virginia and North Carolina, and others in the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, extended his plan and arranged a labor system with fixed wages, hours, and methods of work, and everywhere made use of the captured or abandoned property of the Confederates.

In Tennessee and Arkansas, Chaplain John Eaton of Grant's army employed thousands in a modified free labor system; and further down in Mississippi and Louisiana Generals Grant, Butler, and Banks also put large numbers of captured slaves to work for themselves and for the Government.

Everywhere, as the numbers of Negroes increased, the army commanders divided the occupied Negro regions into districts under superintendents and other officials, framed labor laws, cooperated with benevolent societies which gave schooling and medical care to the blacks, and developed systems of government for them.
The United States Treasury Department, attempting to execute the confiscation laws for the benefit of the Treasury, appears now and then as an employer of Negro labor on abandoned plantations.

Either alone or in cooperation with the army and charitable associations, it even supervised Negro colonies, and sometimes it assumed practically complete control of the economic welfare of the Negro.

This Department introduced in 1864 an elaborate lessee and trade system.