Unique among the states because of the long-term military occupation, during the war Tennessee created a kind of de facto Black Code, which depended on the complicity of police, lawyers, judges, jailers, etc.Forehand, "Striking Resemblance" (1996), pp. 12–13. Slaveholders of Tennessee and the Memphis area struggled with a labor shortage due to slaves escaping to freedom behind Union lines, and they could no longer rely on profits from forced labor. White people resented and were alarmed at the many freedmen at large in Memphis and urged the military to force black people to work. The military took into custody black people classified as vagrants and forced them to accept labor contracts on plantations.Hardwick, "Your Old Father Abe Lincoln Is Dead And Damned" (1993), pp. 113–115. Quote: "Major William Gray, one of Dudley's officers, remarked in September, that 'I am daily urged by influential persons in the city' to compel freedmen and women to accept plantation jobs.' Dudley's attitude regarding the status of freedmen is apparent in a letter that same month, in which he wrote 'worthless, idle, persons have no rights to claim the same benefits arising from their freedom that the industrious and honest are entitled to.' In October he ordered that the streets be patroled by soldiers from Fort Pickering to pick up 'vagrants' and force them to accept labor contracts with rural planters. To some, and especially to black people, this policy seemed akin to the reimposition of slavery."
