Counting the Cost of Freedom
eBook - ePub
Available until 31 Dec |Learn more

Counting the Cost of Freedom

The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Available until 31 Dec |Learn more

Counting the Cost of Freedom

The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access Counting the Cost of Freedom by Amanda Laury Kleintop in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & American Civil War History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. List of Illustrations
  6. Introduction
  7. Chapter One. The National and International Origins of Compensated Emancipation Schemes
  8. Chapter Two. Wartime Emancipation Policies: Compensation and the Contested Status of Property in Persons
  9. Chapter Three. Emancipation and Reunification: The Persistence of Arguments for Compensation after Confederate Surrender
  10. Chapter Four. Writing Compensation Out of the Constitution: The Making of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment
  11. Chapter Five. Debt Relief and Repudiation: The Legal and Economic Consequences of Uncompensated Emancipation
  12. Chapter Six. Writing Uncompensated Emancipation into the Lost Cause
  13. Conclusion
  14. Acknowledgments
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index