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By and large, even if you had a Damascus Road experience that persuaded you suddenly of the evils of slave-owning, by the time the plantation economy of the Southern United States was at its apex it would not have even been possible for a slave owner to undertake this kind of mass manumission of enslaved people. Antebellum slavery was an institution rich in its social, legal and political contradictions. In order to help explain how and why the situation you describe would be so complicated I'd like to first explore some of the issues you've raised from a different angle - criminal law - to explain the context. This not feel terribly relevant but bear with me, as it will all link back to your question.

We are - quite rightly - accustomed to the idea that antebellum slave owners exercised complete and unlimited power within their world. The ability to own another human being as property and to have that claim of ownership legitimised by the society you live in is the most extreme form of power imbalance we can imagine. But the legal and social realities of slavery were a little more complicated than this. Although their legal rights and powers were immense, it was not the case that slave owners possessed unlimited authority over the people they held in bondage in the eyes of state law (though they absolutely did in reality and lived experience), and by the 19th century the institution of slavery is one that has a fairly nuanced legal framework surrounding it. There were in theory certain minimum standards that slave owners were generally expected and required by law to adhere to and respect alongside their right to claim ownership of other human beings.

Take for example these provisions from some contemporary State Constitutions in the Antebellum South:

Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person, and on the like proof [...] - Georgia Constitution of 1798

[The General Assembly may] oblige the owners of slaves to treat them with humanity, to provide for them necessary food and clothing, to abstain from all injuries to them extending to life or limb, and, in case of their neglect, or refusal to comply with the directions of such laws, to have such slave or slaves sold for the benefit of the owner or owners. - Alabama Constitution of 1819

[The State Legislature] shall have full power to oblige the owners of slaves to treat them with humanity, to provide for them necessary clothing and provisions, to abstain from all injuries to them extending to life or limb, and in case of their neglect or refusal to comply with the direction of such laws, to have such slave or slaves sold for the benefit of the owner or owners. - Mississippi Constitution of 1832

More so than anywhere else in the world, slave owners in the Southern United States were by the 19th Century extremely keen to make an argument for slavery as an objective moral good - as a beneficial, benign, positive social institution - rather than as an economic necessity. The laws surrounding slave ownership and treatment reflected this desire. On paper, slave owners were not supposed to be able to mete out unlimited punishment and abuse to enslaved people. Whilst the law recognised a certain power of correction belonging to slave owners and slave drivers, severe punishments were supposed to be handed down following consultation with the local authorities to prove that a serious offence had happened. Where the crime an enslaved person had committed could be punished by the death penalty in state or federal law, then the slave owner was supposed to surrender the enslaved person to the judgement of the state courts. Some States went so far as to establish that when it came to deprivation of life, no distinction could be made between a free person and an enslaved one. The laws did not challenge the legitimacy of slavery - the notion that abuse of slaves should be punished by having one's human property sold off to another was common - but sought to frame it as an institution that had something resembling a moral, human core.

These laws were not simply paper statutes either. We have records of successful prosecutions for the abuse of enslaved people in North Carolina, Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, where courts found slave owners guilty of abuse or neglect and imposed a criminal penalty (usually a fine). The numbers are small in the grand scheme of slave holding but reflect that these laws were not purely for show; they were not quite the equivalent of say, North Korea's laws promising everyone a vote in free and fair elections, where there is no intention to ever honour that provision and no means for it to be enforced. So why, then, if these laws could be enforced and sometimes were with some degree of success, do we hear so much about the horrendous abuse and exploitation of enslaved people in the Southern United States? The answer to that is nuanced but quite straight-forward and will lead us shortly to your question about manumission: the legal framework of limited rights for enslaved people existed to protect the social and cultural dignity of the white elite of the age, not the men and women held in bondage. The laws surrounding murder are a good place to understand this.

Murder in theory was the space in law where all distinctions between 'slave' and 'free' were collapsed. It remained the most serious and most appalling crime one could commit against any person, and in theory the trial of a black defendant and a white defendant should have been exactly the same. Where enslaved people were accused of murder they were even, unlike in most criminal prosecutions, entitled to a trial by jury in most cases by the 19th century, a legal privilege not generally afforded in other criminal cases. But we have far, far fewer records of white owners being successfully prosecuted for murder in the antebellum South than we do abuse. Off the top of my head I only know of two cases were a white defendant was tried for murdering an enslaved person and the court handed down a sentence of capital punishment - one in North Carolina and one in Virginia. Although the laws as they were written in theory imposed certain obligations on slave owners for the treatment of their slaves and provided a very basic level of protection from the most extreme forms of violence to enslaved people, small loopholes and the practical ways in which justice was administered ensured that enslaved people themselves truly had no legal rights to speak of.

In the case of serious injury and murder, Southern laws provided certain pivotal exceptions that greatly diminished the potential for a criminal prosecution against a slave owner. In most cases if a slave owner could demonstrate that someone's death had been the result of the application of corporal punishment as discipline for disobedience or poor work, then as long as a court was satisfied the slave owner could not have reasonably realised he or she was at risk of ending the enslaved person's life, the charge of murder could be mitigated to a lesser charge or dropped altogether. More notably, state laws would contain a rebellion clause - an exception to the murder laws were a slave owner could argue he or she had no choice but to end an enslaved person's life because that enslaved person was starting, or at risk of starting, some kind of violent resistance to enslavement. The section from the Georgia Constitution of 1798 that I quoted earlier contains both of these provisions:

Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person, and on the like proof, except in case of insurrection by such slave, and unless such death should happen by accident in giving such slave moderate correction.

"Insurrection", "state of rebellion", "resistance" and so on could all encompass a very wide range of behaviours and actions. It essentially acted as carte blanche for a slave owner to take the life of an enslaved person for almost any reason, arguing that the slave was not likely to cooperate with a prior demand and so in order to avoid the danger of insurrection, had to be killed. But even if you could somehow make a case where these loopholes did not apply you would need to be a free white person to be able to take the issue to the authorities - in most cases it would not be possible even for a free black person to testify to the courts against a white person, and certainly not possible for a slave to do so. Even if a white person had witnessed the crime and was willing to testify for the prosecution you would need to win over an all-white jury, usually selected through a process that ensured a sympathetic hearing to the slave owner (the odds of a significant number of jurors also being slave owners was quite high). The only way to secure a conviction of a slave owner for serious abuse or murder would essentially be for white society to turn on him or her for whatever reason. The experiences, thoughts and feelings of the enslaved people concerned were not relevant to the judicial process here. Prosecutions of slave owners generally reflect either local political manoeuvring or a concern that some slave owner is so prolifically and notoriously abusive than his actions risk undermining the entire institution of slavery, or have crossed into the territory of disrespecting another man's supposed property.