Compensated Emancipation: District of Columbia Freed Slaves Nine Months Early

On April sixteenth, eighteen sixty-two, Congress did something it had never done before and has never done since: it paid enslavers to free the people they enslaved.

The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act freed approximately three thousand one hundred enslaved people living in the capital, nine months before the Emancipation Proclamation applied to enslaved people in the Confederate states. Enslavers in the District received up to three hundred dollars per person from the federal government. The formerly enslaved received nothing except their freedom.

One hundred dollars in additional funds was made available to any freed person willing to emigrate to Haiti or Liberia, with one hundred thousand dollars total set aside for that purpose. Most of those freed refused the offer and stayed in Washington, which is the more important fact about that provision. They were home. The city was theirs as much as anyone's. A sum of money and a boat to another continent was not a better offer than staying.

What the freed community did next was immediate and organized. They founded schools. They established churches and mutual-aid societies. They laid the institutional groundwork for what would become the District's public school system. The Freedmen's Bureau, headquartered in Washington when it was established three years later, found a community that had been building its own infrastructure since the first days of freedom.

Howard University, founded in eighteen sixty-seven, was a direct product of that community's organized demand for access to higher education.

April sixteenth is now DC Emancipation Day, a public holiday in the District of Columbia. It is the only American city that celebrates its own emancipation date as a holiday. The Capitol dome is visible from where the city's celebrations have historically been held, which is a complicated view, given what the dome was built with.