She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War, with the following results:
The first thing the reader sees on page 99 is the heading “Compensation and the Limits of Constitutional Change.” The previous section, which concludes on the same page, explains how Republicans in Congress in 1866 added a section to the Fourteenth Amendment to invalidate former enslavers’ claims for compensation for enslaved people freed during the Civil War. It also notes that Republicans’ political opponents downplayed the financial and legal need for the section. The subsequent section begins, “Republicans opposed paying enslavers and successfully mobilized uncompensated emancipation as a political tool; however, their stance on emancipation and eminent domain remained ambiguous,” referring to previous discussions in the book.Learn more about Counting the Cost of Freedom at the University of North Carolina Press website.
The Page 99 Test works well for Counting the Cost of Freedom by dropping the reader into one of the book’s core arguments. It is in the middle of Chapter 4, the book’s narrative climax. Previously, the book demonstrates that many enslavers and their political allies insisted that the Constitution, doctrines of property law, principles of fairness and the need for regional economic stability dictated that they be reimbursed for the lost value of the enslaved people they legally held as property prior to the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. However, there had been no doctrinal consensus on whether that was true in peacetime, let alone after the Confederacy seceded and lost a war over slavery. Chapter 4, and page 99 specifically, summarizes the congressional response to their claims.
If the Page 99 Test fails, it is because the reader will enter the book in the middle of the action. The drama and humanity of post-war politics is lost on readers who haven’t read Congressman John Broomall’s speech railing against paying enslavers, who “murdered two hundred and ninety thousand of our fellow-citizens.” He continued, “Let our political opponents call the dead to life. . . . We will then pay for their slaves.” This page leaves out other major characters in and outside of Congress involved in this debate.
It’s also difficult to gauge why section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment was so important or why “the limits of constitutional change” matter without understanding enslaver’s long-standing claims for compensation based on their self-proclaimed property rights in people. The Fourteenth Amendment invalidated former enslavers’ claims for compensation, but subsequent sections and chapters argue that Republicans stopped short at instigating lasting economic reform. Section 4 created a constitutional framework that retroactively expanded federal authority for immediate, uncompensated emancipation without suggesting that the US could permanently confiscate other forms of property. That enabled former enslavers to profit from other vestiges of slavery’s economic system. Eventually, the book argues, this ambiguity enabled Lost Cause propagandists to minimize the history of white southerners’ resistance to emancipation only after they had succeeded in focusing attention on what the nation owed enslavers, not what it owed the formerly enslaved.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
