The first federal emancipation paid enslavers, not the newly freed.

Evidence

The Compensated Emancipation Act was the first instance of the US government paying compensation for ending slavery—but the payment was made primarily to white enslavers. The process established by the act focused exclusively on the perpetrators of slavery and on what they were owed for giving up their “property,” not on the actual human beings who had been enslaved and treated as less than human for generations. Moreover, those who were enslaved were subject to the whims of their enslavers. If their enslaver resisted the new law and refused to recognize that slavery had ended, then the enslaved had no legal proof of their freedom. The process was designed to begin with the filing of a petition, and enslavers could simply refuse to file, and the process to certify the enslaved person’s freedom would not be completed. In other words, without action by their enslaver, enslaved people could not prove that they were free. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 102

Categorization

• XREF: This is the strongest concrete anchor for the reparations-as-accounting thesis: the US already did compensated emancipation once, and paid the wrong party.
• DEEPTHINKING: The structural logic here — that a right granted by law was made unenforceable without the wrongdoer’s cooperation — is the exact architecture of harm Brown’s reparations case needs.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 102