The US’s first emancipation-compensation scheme paid enslavers, not the enslaved

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. And many enslavers did just that. They moved their enslaved workers outside district lines, engaged in other chicanery to evade the technical applicability of the law, or simply ignored the law. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 102

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Precedent that compensation for emancipation was structurally directed at perpetrators supports the reparations argument in ‘On Sacrifice’ about who gets paid.
• XREF: connects to: The state compensated masters for executed slaves to prevent concealment of slave crime — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 467