Compensation hearings forced freed people to be re-examined as property

Evidence

After submitting her petition, Margaret received a summons to appear in person before the commissioners to have her property evaluated and her loyalty to the Union proven. This meant she had to bring her formerly enslaved people along with her for examination. As the petitioner, she was also responsible for locating any of the formerly enslaved who had left after the act was signed into law. In order to be compensated for them, she would have to bring them before the commission at City Hall, where “under gaslight chandeliers, in one or another of the courtrooms as it happened to be vacant, sat the tribunal and a slave dealer from Baltimore.” If the formerly enslaved could not be found, then the petitioner had to bring a witness who could attest to their characteristics. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 94

Categorization

• XREF: The theatrical humiliation at City Hall with ‘a slave dealer from Baltimore’ present echoes Brown’s genre-shift point that remedy-design itself can re-traumatize - a design flaw worth noting in any reparations architecture.