Counting the Cost of Freedom (eBook)

The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War

Amanda Laury Kleintop (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
The University of North Carolina Press (Verlag)
978-1-4696-8868-8 (ISBN)

Infos

During the Civil War, the US government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white Souths wealth by nearly 50 percent. After the Confederacys defeat, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people and fought for other policies that would recognize abolitions 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 descendantsa debate that persists in todays national dialogue.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 19.8.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Rechtsgeschichte
• ISBN-10: 1-4696-8868-9 / 1469688689
• ISBN-13: 978-1-4696-8868-8 / 9781469688688