You sound like a union organizer.
Maybe it hasn't occurred to you, but the difference between the chain gang and the sharecropper and the slave is that the chain gang convict has been convicted by a jury of his peers and his children aren't going to be born into the chain gang and die on the chain gang. Likewise with the sharecropper, with the additional fact that he always has the option of leaving, something that they did in their hundreds of thousands for better jobs...wait for it...in the north.
It was a Republican legislature that rewrote their Militia Act to ban private exercise of firearms and repeal 2A from every Illinoisan. They did it to "get" union organizers who were looking for workers to sign up in taverns and saloons. They would frequently send Chicago cops (the original "Chicago bulls") into those places and break them up, sending guys to the hospital and sometimes killing them.
So when a union organizer named Presser put together a shooting club and marched in a public holiday parade, the bosses had him arrested and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, n/w/s that Presser's defender was the firm of Lyman Trumbull, who was Lincoln's compromise candidate, and a "war Democrat," for the Senate when he realized he couldn't "reach" in the 1855 session of the Illinois legislature that sat to elect a U.S. senator.
Presser vs. Illinois remains a stain on the American body of law and a rich man's challenge to the rights of Americans to stand up to Government and Money, whether public or private. Just the sort of thing your hero Alexander Hamilton would approve of, n/w/s his earlier public positions supporting a Militia. (Hint: He was a hypocrite. Never wanted the People to have rights, only people like himself: "People Like Us" as New England Old Money say to one another today.)
Milton Friedman said it, and I believe him: Without the labor movement, there would be no middle class today. It was the right to negotiate in groups that allowed laborers to receive more of what they'd earned, from the value that they'd added.
Does that help comprehension?
.....and his children aren't going to be born into the chain gang and die on the chain gang.
No, they'll be walking down a country road one day and one of the sheriff's cars will suddenly stop and back up. 'Bye, kid.