Right you are, that of course was always the argument from the South and the supporters of slavery at the time of the Civil War and right through the plantation literature I spoke of earlier. If Lincoln had just left us alone we would have freed all our slaves without this dirty old war. That is why the South immediately took steps to reenslave their former slaves with the loophole in the 13th Amendment and that is also why Richard Wright could write and document the conditions still existing in his book from 1941, 12 Million Black Voices. And that is also why the 10,000 prison plantation at Parchman was in operation until the early 70s.
And why as soon as the troops were removed (not really this is myth) after the compromise of 1876, the South immediately returned to a regime of chain gang, peonage and plantation prison farm labor to re-enslave the black male population. Much of this is well documented in a book that actually did win the Pulitzer Prize, Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008) and elsewhere. So if what you are saying here is true or even plausible, why would it take years of court cases and Supreme Court decisions starting with the decision in the 1914 case U.S. v. Reynolds, 235 U.S. 150 that holding a person captive to pay for their debt of their court costs was unconstitutional thus outlawing peonage which only made the Southerners try harder and continue the same practice under a different regimen to actually end this practice in the late twentieth century. This is all well documented in another book that evidently no one here has read other than myself titled Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865-1900 (2000) BY Mary Ellen Curtin.
Come one where is that list of books you old bastard. Let's see what you have actually read. So far I can't tell that you have read anything but that one book!