George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

The Richards Center community workshopped “Writing Compensation out of the Constitution: The Making of Section Four of the Fourteenth Amendment,” a chapter from Dr. Amanda Kleintop’s forthcoming manuscript. Dr. Kleintop’s work examines how the United States was one of the few nations in the nineteenth century that abolished slavery without providing monetary or indirect compensation for the vast majority of enslavers. However, neither US
military victories in the Civil War, moral repugnance for the idea that people could be property, nor the Thirteenth Amendment guaranteed immediate, uncompensated emancipation in the South. Rather, Dr. Kleintop argues that it was the result of a post-war contest where Americans leveraged their understandings of wartime loyalty and slavery’s role in the law and economy to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, whose fourth section prohibited any state or the US from paying “any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave.” This chapter explores the origins and outcomes of section four, arguing that the Congress passed section four and dismissed contentious wartime debates over property rights in people to secure Republican control over Reconstruction and uncompensated emancipation as a legacy of Union victory.