They would have hired back freed blacks at a higher wage?
And they were already losing economically to the North who employed their own version of slave labor?
I don’t think this would have worked.
The slave-like labor conditions of the North are very little discussed, because the Left wants to hold that region up as some sort of moral hotbed. But the fact of the matter is that many Northern industrialists wanted to destroy their Southern competition through the slavery issue.
The South could not have followed the route you outlines because they would have failed economically even faster than under their slave system.
It's called share cropping. Look it up sometime.
Respectfully -- that's an absurd contention, completely at odds with the historical facts.
The Post-War South did survive economically (albeit just barely) with an utterly wrecked infrastructure and very little monetary Capital with which to pay wages to freedman black Labor after the war; a No-War South which was flush with money from Compensated Emancipation, and with its infrastructure still intact, could certainly have better afforded to offer more jobs and higher wages to freedman blacks, than the economically-devastated Post-War South was able to offer.
But they did follow... after the Civil War.
It was called share-cropping. And the plantation owners simply paid a subsistent wage and then opened up a plantation store, with prices high enough to eat up all the wages that were paid.