Freeing of Slaves and Indentured Servants
Slave owners suffered a loss whenever their slaves or indentured servants were granted their freedom. Slave owners might have been paid to cover their losses.
When the slaves of Zanzibar were freed in 1897, it was by compensation since the prevailing opinion was that the slave owners suffered the loss of an asset whenever a slave was freed.
In the 1860s in the United States, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln had requested many millions of dollars from Congress with which to compensate slave owners for the loss of their slaves. On July 9, 1868, Section IV of the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment dismissed all of the claims that slave owners had been injured by the freeing of the slaves.
In 1807-08, in Prussia, statesman Baron Heinrich vom Stein introduced a series of reforms, the principal of which was the abolition of serfdom with indemnification to territorial lords.
Haiti was required to pay an indemnity of 150,000,000 francs to France in order to atone for the loss suffered by the French slave owners.
Read more about this topic: Indemnity
Famous quotes containing the words freeing, slaves and/or servants:
“The clock of communism has stopped striking. But its concrete building has not yet come crashing down. For that reason, instead of freeing ourselves, we must try to save ourselves from being crushed by its rubble.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)