During the Civil War, the U.S. federal 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 in Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), 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.
Amanda Laury Kleintop is assistant professor of history at Elon University.
Ryan Tripp is an adjunct for universities and California community colleges.
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