Two years after South Carolina became the first state to secede from the United States in December 1860, President Abraham Lincoln addressed the Senate and House of Representatives, announcing his support for a plan that would pay reparations to slaveholders in border states (slave states that had not seceded) if they would implement gradual emancipation and pledge loyalty to the union. It was a last-ditch attempt to prevent further secession, and one that Lincoln justified with his opinion that “gradual, and not sudden, emancipation” would be “better for all.”
The resolution passed in April 1862, allocating $180 million to be disbursed to slaveholders in exchange for freeing the estimated 600,000 people “held in legitimate slavery.” It was one of the last plans for compensated emancipation, a form of government indemnification to slaveholders for the forcible removal of their property: people enslaved both by force and the law. (Throughout this piece I use property terms such as investment and market value only when needed to demonstrate the thinking behind the government’s actions; like the law itself, it nearly always framed emancipation from an enslaver’s perspective, rather than that of the enslaved.)
The United States continued its bloody Civil War for another three years, and this compensated emancipation proposal was never accepted in border states. But a similar plan was signed at the same time, and executed successfully, in Washington, DC. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act brought immediate emancipation to the region and promised compensation to enslavers who pledged loyalty to the Union and submitted claims for their losses. Former enslavers could claim up to $300 per slave but often received much less. Their written petitions detailing the capabilities of formerly enslaved individuals often requested larger amounts: one petition described “a sober and industrious man and, your petitioner believes, a professor of religion” that the slaveholder determined was “of the value of one thousand dollars in money.” An estimated 3,100 enslaved individuals gained their freedom with the law’s passage, while former slaveholders were given ninety days to submit their petitions in the months that followed. A district board of commissioners reviewed and approved the majority of the 966 petitions, compensating slaveholders for 2,981 enslaved people. It was considered a win for the Union; on the evening of the act’s passage, the New York Daily Tribune declared that “three thousand people may devoutly thank God tomorrow, and a nation of twenty million rejoice with them at their peaceful enfranchisement by the benign act of the Law.”
This case is often cited as the sole example of enslavers actually receiving indemnification—or what we might call reparations—for abolition, but similar compensation plans, such as the one Lincoln advocated for in border states, not only existed but were part of an ongoing effort to lessen the loss abolition posed to slaveholders. These earlier plans for compensated emancipation are what Lincoln referred to as “gradual” emancipation, and they shifted the financial burden of emancipation onto enslaved people rather than have the state or enslavers bear the costs themselves. Framing these laws as state-sanctioned restitution provides necessary context for contemporary debates surrounding reparations by offering alternative examples of compensation and proof of the nation’s willingness to pay up at politically beneficial moments.