Uncompensated enslaved people were legally free but not truly free

Evidence

But what about Peter Jenkins, Richard Williams, Susan Carroll, and the rest of the thirty-four people enslaved at Northview—what happened to them? The newly freed received nothing to compensate them for the wealth that Margaret Barber had stripped from them in the form of wages. Total wage theft from slavery is conservatively estimated to be $19 trillion. Now they were no longer enslaved, but lacking resources, they weren’t truly free either. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 114

Categorization

• DEFINE: Destroys the formal freedom/actual freedom distinction — being free required resources the state never provided, connecting the 1860s directly to today’s wealth gap. Core to Brown’s saturated-system argument.
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the sacrifice article’s logic that formal liberation without resources was a hollow accounting — the counterfactual of what freeing ‘with means’ would have required.