Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War (Civil War America)

Kleintop, Amanda Laury

ISBN 10: 1469688654 / ISBN 13: 9781469688657

Published by The University of North Carolina Press, 2025

About this Item

Seller Inventory # I-9781469688657

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War (Civil War America)
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1469688654
• ISBN 13: 9781469688657
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

During the Civil War, the US government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50 percent. After the Confederacy’s defeat, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people and fought for other policies that would recognize abolition’s costs during Reconstruction. As Amanda Laury Kleintop shows, their persistence eventually led to the creation of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which abolished the right to profit from property in people. Surprisingly, former Confederates responded by using Lost Cause history-making to obscure the fact that they had demanded financial redress in the first place. The largely successful efforts of white southerners to erase this history continues to generate false understandings today.

Kleintop draws from an impressive array of archival sources to uncover this lost history. In doing so, she demonstrates how this legal battle also undermined efforts by formerly enslaved people to receive reparations for themselves and their descendants—a debate that persists in today’s national dialogue.

About the Author

Amanda Laury Kleintop is assistant professor of history at Elon University.