Amanda Laury Kleintop, "Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War" (UNC Press, 2025)

New Books in African American Studies · Oct 27, 2025 · 56m

During the Civil War, the U.S. federal 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 in Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation After the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), their persistence eventually led to the creation…