Sure, you keep a people ignorant - pass laws against them becoming educated - keep them working from before sunrise to after sunset at back breaking labor - THEN claim that they simply are not ready for freedom!
Slavery was a blight upon not just those held in slavery - but the slave holding society itself.
After emancipation many of Washington's relations did indeed stay on the farm - where they continued to do the work and tend to the children and wash the puke from the the face of the drunkard who inherited the farm, undress him and put him to bed when he stumbled in.
“The whole machinery of slavery was so constructed as to cause labour, as a rule, to be looked upon as a badge of degradation, of inferiority. Hence labour was something that both races on the slave plantation sought to escape. The slave system on our place, in a large measure, took the spirit of self-reliance and self help out of the white people. My old master had many boys and girls, but not one, so far as I know, mastered a single trade or special line of productive industry. The girls were not taught to cook, sew, or even to take care of the house.”
If you want me to defend slavery I won’t. My only comment is that the former slave, now share cropper, worked 3 hour days and lounged around until supper. Every day, including harvest time reading Harpers Magazine.