Counting the Cost of Freedom

Name: Counting the Cost of Freedom
Brand: The University of North Carolina Press
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By Kleintop, Amanda Laury

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Description

During the Civil War, the US government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50 percent. After the Confederacy’s defeat, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people and fought for other policies that would recognize abolition’s costs during Reconstruction. As Amanda Laury Kleintop shows, their persistence eventually led to the creation of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which abolished the right to profit from property in people. Surprisingly, former Confederates responded by using Lost Cause history-making to obscure the fact that they had demanded financial redress in the first place. The largely successful efforts of white southerners to erase this history continues to generate false understandings today.
Kleintop draws from an impressive array of archival sources to uncover this lost history. In doing so, she demonstrates how this legal battle also undermined efforts by formerly enslaved people to receive reparations for themselves and their descendants—a debate that persists in today’s national dialogue.

Product details

Number of Pages:: 272
Release Date:: 2025-08-19
Publication Date:: 2025-08-19
Publisher:: The University of North Carolina Press
Languages:: Original: English
ISBN10:: 1469688646
ISBN13:: 9781469688640
Weight:: 625 g
Height:: 161 cm
Width:: 240 cm
Thickness:: 21 cm

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