Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War

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Amanda Laury Kleintop

Counting the Cost of Freedom

Name: Counting the Cost of Freedom
Price: 229 AUD
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ISBN: 9781469688640

The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War

Amanda Laury Kleintop

$229

Hardback

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English

The University of North Carolina Press
19 August 2025

History of the Americas; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900; Slavery & abolition of slavery; Legal history

Series: Civil War America

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.

By: Amanda Laury Kleintop
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 25mm, Spine: 155mm
ISBN: 9781469688640
ISBN 10: 1469688646
Series: Civil War America
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 19 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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

Reviews for Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War

""Amanda Kleintop's compelling and well-argued book tells us an important but largely forgotten story about the decision to forbid compensation for emancipation in the aftermath of the Civil War. Kleintop's work reveals truths long buried about how contested and contingent uncompensated emancipation really was.""--Cynthia Nicoletti, University of Virginia ""Kleintop gives her readers a rich, deeply researched account of how slavery really came to an end in the United States. A compelling story that explains how Americans constructed a postwar world that owed the enslaved nothing.""--Joanna Cohen, Queen Mary University of London