Whether five years after Emancipation or a century and a half later, whether the claimants were the formerly enslaved or their descendants, the United States has steadfastly refused at nearly every opportunity to provide recompense for slavery and its disastrous legacy. The country reneged on its post-Emancipation promise of 40 acres and a mule just a few months after making it. In the 1890s, the federal government brutally crushed a national campaign to give freed black people pension plans. And for nearly each of the last 30 years, Congress has rejected a bill that would merely create a commission to study the consequences of slavery and consider the impact of reparations.
“Any legislation that sought to put black people on an equal footing has been ultimately, if not strangled in the crib, slowly starved,” historian Carroll Gibbs, the author of Black, Copper, & Bright: The District of Columbia’s Black Civil War Regiment, told me. “It’s important to understand that what makes the argument hollow—that it’s too late to do anything because everybody’s dead now—is that the US refused to do it when everyone was still alive.”
Instead, the US government supported and enshrined into law policies that further entrenched white supremacy. Case in point: The only reparations program enacted by the federal government doled out the 2020 equivalent of over $23 million in Treasury Department funds—not to the formerly enslaved but to their white enslavers.
In April 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act, a congressional bill abolishing slavery in Washington, DC. Less than half a year earlier, he proposed similar legislation in Delaware that stalled in the state’s House of Representatives. Under the DC law—the first emancipation legislation in this country’s history—enslavers were eligible to receive up to $300 for each person they were legally obliged to liberate. (I use the term “enslaver” rather than “slave owner” because it acknowledges the active role those individuals played in keeping human beings locked in a brutal and violent institution. And while the reductive term “slave” has historically been used to strip black people of their humanity, referring to an “enslaved person” makes clear that bondage was a legally enforced position.) No such provision was made for DC’s newly freed black population. Instead, seeing no more use for them, the government offered formerly enslaved people funds only if they agreed to relocate to Haiti, Liberia, “or such other country beyond the limits of the United States.” For this act of self-deportation from the land they had made an economic powerhouse, payment would “not exceed one hundred dollars for each emigrant.”
Almost no freed people took up the government on its insulting offer, but DC-area enslavers submitted 966 petitions in the months following the law’s passage. In accordance with eligibility requirements, each filer declared loyalty to the Union and presented itemized descriptions—essentially, invoices—of those they’d enslaved, assigning estimated dollar amounts to each human being. Lincoln empaneled a three-person commission to render a final judgment on the monetary merit of each petition and thus on the black lives described therein.