Counting the Cost of Freedom

The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War

Amanda Laury Kleintop (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

280 Seiten

2025
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-8865-7 (ISBN)

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During the Civil War, the US government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South's wealth by nearly 5 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.

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

Erscheinungsdatum	08.07.2025
Reihe/Serie	Civil War America
Zusatzinfo	8 illustrations - 8 halftones, 1 table, notes, index - 1 Tables, unspecified - 8 Halftones, unspecified - Index
Verlagsort	Chapel Hill
Sprache	englisch
Maße	25 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
	Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
ISBN-10	1-4696-8865-4 / 1469688654
ISBN-13	978-1-4696-8865-7 / 9781469688657
Zustand	Neuware