The Balance of Freedom: Abolishing Property Rights in Slaves during and After the Civil War

FAIN: FT-269949-20

Amanda Laury Kleintop
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (North Adams, MA 01247-4124)

Research and writing one chapter of a book interrogating the significance of policies governing property rights in slaves before and after Emancipation.

Until the US Civil War, legal recognition of property rights in slaves enabled slaveholders, merchants, and investors to buy and sell slaves on credit and to mortgage slaves. The US government’s wartime decision to abolish slavery without reimbursing slaveowners for the lost value of freed slaves threatened to send this complex system of finance, founded on human property, into chaos. From 1864-1871, southern and federal lawmakers and judges, as well as everyday southerners, argued over who ought to be responsible for the financial burden of emancipation. This project explores the little-known history of white southerners’ defense of their perceived right to own slaves or to be reimbursed for their value. Their debates, ranging from former Confederate states to the US Capital, reveal that immediate, uncompensated emancipation in the US South was not an inevitable outcome of Union victory in the Civil War, and the process of emancipation extended well beyond the abolition of slavery.

Associated Products

Wallace Johnson First Book Author Program (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Wallace Johnson First Book Author Program
Author: Amanda Laury Kleintop
Abstract: The Wallace Johnson Program for First Book Authors provides advice and support to scholars working toward the publication of first books in legal history, broadly defined. In conversation with peers and with the advice of senior scholars, participants develop and revise book proposals and sample chapters, as well as meeting with guest editors to learn about approaching and working with publishers.
Date Range: July 16-17, 2020
Location: Virtual

Massachusetts Historical Society’s Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Massachusetts Historical Society’s Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar
Author: Amanda Laury Kleintop
Abstract: After the US Civil War, white southerners claimed federal reimbursements for the value of freed slaves Federal lawmakers rejected these claims in the Fourteenth Amendment. Yet, historians have long concluded that white southerners accepted uncompensated emancipation. Why did Americans forget these claims? This paper argues that white southerners abandoned them in the 1880s-1890s and rewrote history. They insisted that property in humans was “unprofitable,” and they did not need compensation after Confederate defeat. This narrative helped them reestablish political power and absolve themselves of four years of bloodshed and generations of enslavement. The Dina G. Malgeri Modern American Society & Culture Seminar invites you to come join the conversation. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper.
Date Range: October 27, 2020

To Protect the Innocent: Abolishing Property Rights in Slaves after the Civil War (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: To Protect the Innocent: Abolishing Property Rights in Slaves after the Civil War
Author: Amanda Laury Kleintop
Abstract: This paper reveals that debates over whether the U.S. government secured slaveowners’ property rights in slaves continued after the Civil War. White southerners seceded from the U.S. in 1860-1861 to create a national government that protected their rights to own humans. Politicians and lawmakers of the time, as well as today’s historians, could not agree whether the U.S. government or slave states’ laws secured investments in slaves. As early as 1864, border state politicians who remained in the U.S. and southern politicians who sought re-entry into the Union challenged wartime emancipation and debated: who should pay the price of abolition? These debates granted a new meaning to emancipation, enabling the federal government to claim control over slavery’s legal and economic afterlife. Seeking federal compensation for the value of freed slaves and relief for outstanding debts for the value of slaves, these politicians argued that the U.S. Constitution protected their investments in human property and positioned widows and children as "innocents" who neither participated in the war nor the slave economy. Their strategy failed when the federal government nullified all claims for compensation in the Fourteenth Amendment and the U.S. Supreme Court recognized all outstanding contracts for human property in 1871.
Date Range: March 31-April 3, 2021
Location: Virtual

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