Newly freed enslaved people had to pay a fee to certify their freedom

Evidence

If the enslaved managed to prove their case and win their freedom, as Beckett did, the Compensated Emancipation Act required them to pay twenty-five cents to secure a certificate of freedom from the federal government. That was also the case for those freed if their enslaver filed a petition. That’s right. The enslaved, who were released without a penny to their name, had to pay a fee just to get papers declaring they were free. The enslaved, who were never compensated for their years and decades of labor, had to pay for their freedom. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 110

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the accounting framing for a reparations case: even the bureaucratic paperwork of freedom was monetized against the enslaved — supports article 3’s logic of how the state extracted from the enslaved at every turn.