There Should Be No Further Argument Over Reparations After You Read This

PushBlack
April 25, 2019

Before President Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation, he used the 1862 District of Columbia Emancipation Act (DCEA) as a dress rehearsal.

The act declared freedom for enslaved people across the nation’s capital. However, he snuck a compensation clause in to get the deal done.

To keep his political allies happy, Lincoln asked border states to voluntarily do the right thing.

But this was an economically lucrative SYSTEM he was suggesting they destroy and thus, he decided, financial compensation would need to be factored into the negotiations.

A clause gave slaveowners $300 (worth approx. $9,000 today) for every freed slave.

To the newly freed, he offered just $100 and a one-way ticket to either Haiti or Liberia - and had the nerve to call it even.

Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and others denounced the absurd compromise saying, “[Compensation] should be given to the outraged and guiltless slaves, and not to those who have plundered and abused them.”

Black people agreed and many tried to sue their former masters for money or land, but few were successful.

The act stood, and former slaveowners were given local AND federal funds to handle their loss of “private assets.”

Just imagine what the highest slave owner payout of $18,000 (approx. $551,280 today) could have done for the lineage of a Black family struggling today.

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