Freedom without enslaver compensation became the lever that forced enslaver cooperation.

Evidence

At President Lincoln’s urging, Congress approved a Supplemental Act on July 12, 1862, which empowered the enslaved to take control of their own destinies. As a result, they no longer had to wait for their enslavers to do the right thing. Instead, they could request emancipation by filing their own claim. Moreover, the Supplemental Act granted freedom to enslaved persons without any compensation to their enslavers, so it provided an additional financial incentive to enslavers to request compensation under the original act. Some enslavers, however, still chose slavery, either because they hoped the legislation would be declared unconstitutional or they were simply prepared to violate the law. The addiction to exploiting black labor is not easily shaken. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Shows how the Freedmen’s Bureau / later Reconstruction relied on carrots and sticks; also could tie to coercive-institution analysis used for the diamond bourse literature.
• SEED: Angle: the incentives that actually ended chattel slavery structurally — compensation bribes plus a free-emancipation threat — as a template for designing modern reparations policy.