Booknotes: Counting the Cost of Freedom

New Arrival:

• Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War by Amanda Laury Kleintop (UNC Press, 2025).

With the destruction of slavery during the Civil War, which occurred on a timetable far more instant than gradual in nature and was without compensation to slaveowners, it has been estimated by some that half the American South's wealth disappeared. The attempts to recover that wealth in the form of monetary compensation from the government is the subject of Amanda Laury Kleintop's Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War.

I've often thought that the Lincoln administration's various wartime overtures to the loyal slaveholders of the Border States, offering the prospect of compensation in exchange for voluntary emancipation, would make for an interesting book someday. This is not that. As Kleintop (who refers to loyalist claims as being distinctly different in regard to compensated emancipation) explains in her introduction, her focus is on the Confederate South, though she does necessarily incorporate some Border State politicians and politics into the mix. Between 1864 and the 1870s, Southern compensation advocates cited international precedent and the takings clause of the Constitution's Fifth Amendment to make their case for economic redress.

From the description: "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."

Kleintop's narrative, which involves periods before, during, and after the Civil War, unfolds in chronological order. The first chapter "surveys the antebellum arguments and precedents for compensated emancipation in US law and the larger Atlantic world." Centering on the representative roles of Frederick Douglas, Kentucky senator Garrett Davis, President Lincoln, and slaveholding Louisiana loyalists, legalities surrounding wartime emancipation are addressed in Chapter 2. The following chapter explains the objections raised by former Confederates over the constitutional legality of uncompensated emancipation, while the congressional response (specifically the Fourteenth Amendment's Section 4) is detailed in Chapter 5. Former slaveowners continued to press for compensation well into the postwar period, and the final two chapters of Kleintop's study trace their ultimately fruitless campaign. By the author's interpretation of events, those efforts only stopped after a major strategic political shift occurred, the new attitude (expressed in parallel with southern claims that matters associated with slavery were not the leading cause for secession) being that compensation was "neither wanted nor needed" (pp. 9-10).