Reparations for enslavement have long been a controversial topic, with scholarly research examining the evolution of the issue and a variety of studies debating what governments, universities, institutions, and private enterprise may owe for “the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil,” as Abraham Lincoln put it, to those descended from them. Amid this important discussion, historians have paid much less attention to the idea of compensating the enslavers who tried to control them and went to war to maintain and enhance that control, beyond studies of Lincoln’s emancipation policies during the Civil War and occasional analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment’s injunction against Confederate debts.

But thanks to Amanda Laury Kleintop, we now know much more about the issue of compensation for the enslavers after the end of both war and enslavement. Counting the Cost of Freedom is a tour de force of research and analysis that will be the starting point for future discussions of the efforts among enslavers, both Confederate and Union, after the war to win compensation. Despite the title, which suggests that the book begins when the war ends (figuring out that date is hard enough, as scholars from Heather Cox Richardson to Michael Vorenberg have made clear), she also has made a significant contribution to our understanding of emancipation schemes during the war itself, the motivations of the Confederates, and the ensuing economic and legal tangle.

Kleintop traces prewar and wartime discussions of compensated emancipation, both because it was important at the time and to set up the story she tells later. She details her arguments regarding the need to amend the Constitution to avoid compensated emancipation: Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment was crucial and not the punishment for former Confederates that scholars have claimed it to be, and that, unsurprisingly, compensation for former enslavers became a significant political issue, and eventually a historiographical one. It also ended up a casualty of the Lost Cause narrative: “They erased the fact that abolition annihilated an entire category of valuable property—and that many white Southerners had fought hard for compensation during and immediately after the war” (9).

One of Kleintop’s many contributions is to remind us that the “Civil War Amendments” affected and resulted from concerns about the freed people’s liberties in the wake of emancipation, but they had other meanings related to compensation. The Fifth Amendment’s “takings clause” provided an opening for those seeking compensation, whether border states enslavers who felt their loyalty had been taken for granted or Southerners claiming that they technically had never left the Union and hoped for compensated emancipation, payment of the Confederate war debt, or both. During the debates on the Thirteenth Amendment, the issue arose, and it became “an important compromise measure for Republicans and border state politicians” (91). The Republican solution, Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, was a masterstroke. “By combining compensation with the issue of the national debt, Republicans leveraged loyalty as a political tool to gain support for the amendment. These issues fit together because attitudes toward compensation, the national debt, and Confederate debt were barometers of loyalty, not just fiscal politics …” Kleintop argues (p. 95). The US could and undoubtedly would pay the largest national debt in its history, but “increasing it by compensating enslavers or paying Confederate state debts could alarm investors in the United States and abroad” (p. 95). Further, enfranchising the freedmen would provide votes to counter the efforts of their former enslavers to be compensated. Kleintop’s argument opens a new vista for examining how the Civil War amendments passed and why.

During Redemption, Kleintop found, some Southern politicians sought to build a new coalition against Democratic control by supporting compensation for enslavers, and in some cases, for the enslaved. However, earlier, “when calls to pay enslavers began to hurt their political goals, former Confederates and Southern Democrats abandoned and then lied about them to bolster their political prominence and national legacy,” and the Dunning School and the Lost Cause narrative subsequently reshaped our memories of the issue (p. 171). Kleintop reminds us that today’s debates about reparations for descendants of the enslaved, similar to yesterday’s debates about compensation for the enslavers, have political, legal, and economic underpinnings. Those debates about reparations will continue, and what those who rebelled against the country and the Constitution to try to protect their right to own human beings sought as compensation is now a much clearer part of the historical record, thanks to this superb book.