The federal government paid enslavers, not the enslaved, to end DC slavery.

Evidence

The road to emancipation started, in the early 1860s, with an “experiment” in the District of Columbia. Would white enslavers be more supportive of ending slavery if they knew they would receive cash compensation for each enslaved person the law set free? … That idea resulted in the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which became law in April 1862 and ended slavery in the District of Columbia. It required cash payments to white enslavers for each enslaved person legally freed. The federal government allocated $1 million for the effort. The final Treasury report referred to these payments as “claimed compensation.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 55

Categorization

• XREF: The key precedent for modern reparations debates — the first US emancipation paid enslavers as ‘claimed compensation,’ which reframes the accounting question of who the creditor was.
• SEED: The word ‘claimed compensation’ in the Treasury report is a quiet genealogical irony worth an essay: compensation went to enslavers for property, not to freedpeople for lives stolen.