The Price of Freedom - April 16, 1862

On April 16, 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the DC Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing nearly 3,200 enslaved people in the nation's capital a full eight and a half months before the Emancipation Proclamation. But almost nobody knows the most remarkable detail: the only time the federal government paid money directly connected to American slavery, it paid the slaveholders. Not the enslaved. The slaveholders. This is the story of a genuine moral breakthrough wrapped in a genuine moral compromise, and why it still echoes in debates we're having today.