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The good news: you're free. The (potentially) bad news: as in free to leave the country.

Today's Civil War fact: The law that emancipated DC slaves compensated owners $300 per slave. It also offered those former slaves $100 each to emigrate.

It's one of the sharpest examples of the racism of many (though certainly not all) white abolitionists, who might have objected to slavery as an institution but were not quite up for accepting blacks as equal citizens of the United States. The colonization movement mostly focused on sending former slaves to Liberia, although the DC law didn't specify where a former slave had to go.

From the perspective of free blacks--whether newly freed or whether born free to free parents--emigration was more complicated. Some free blacks chose, even without any compensation, to move to Liberia, or to Haiti or Canada. Why? Because even in states were slavery was illegal, discrimination was not. Schools, jobs, housing, public transit, the right to vote--any of that might be denied to someone purely based on race. In some cases, well into the second half of the twentieth century.

150 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln paid slaveowners $1million. Yes, that Abraham Lincoln.

The slaves in Washington D.C. were freed through "compensated emancipation." That means slaveowners were paid $300 for each of their slaves, who then became permanently free. The U.S. government picked up the tab, allocating a million dollars to buy the freedom of three thousand slaves living in D.C.

This was not the first time Lincoln advocated for compensated emancipation. Earlier in 1862, he proposed paying $400 per slave to emancipate all the slaves in "the border states"--states that had not seceded but still allowed slavery. Why? Here's how I explain it in The Secrets of Mary Bowser, by putting words into the mouth of Confederate cabinet member Judah Benjamin:

“Four hundred dollars for every slave in Delaware is but half the cost of one day of war for the Union. Four hundred dollars for every slave in Maryland, Missouri, the District of Columbia, and Mrs. Lincoln’s own Kentucky would be the cost of eighty-seven days of war. Lincoln gambles that compensated emancipation will shorten the war by that many days or more, by ensuring the loyalty of the border states.”

The larger compensated emancipation was never passed--and the slaves in the border states were the last to be emancipated, legally. They were not freed until *after* the Civil War, because the Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in states that had seceded.

Tomorrow, I'll write about the other $100 Lincoln was willing to pay per slave in Washington, D.C.

"The chambermaid had left the room sobbing for joy...Were I a drinker I would get on a Jolly spree today"

I know that sounds like a scene out of a naughty film. But it's not.

The weeping chambermaid and would-be Jolly drinker (he prayed instead) were among the first slaves emancipated during the Civil War. In April 1862, eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, President Lincoln and Congress worked together (imagine that!) to pass special legislation freeing the 3,000 slaves in the nation's capital.

Emancipation Day is still celebrated each year in Washington, D.C. It's important not just for changing the lives of those 3,000 people, and their families and friends, but also for providing a significant precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation, and beyond that to the ending of slavery throughout the United States.

For those of you who aren't Civil War-obsessed, it means one more day before you have to file your income taxes, because April 16 is a holiday in D.C.

But really, who isn't Civil War obsessed????

There's an article in The New York Times today about Ford's efforts to revive Lincoln as car brand.

May I suggest possible new models:
The Emancipator
The Rail Splitter
The Great Orator
The Honest Abe
and for the sports car, The Abey Baby

Any others to add to the list?

The legacy of the Civil War lives on, from spittin' bullets 60 years after the war ended, to burying a Union soldier TOMORROW, here in Portland.

Today's Oregonian recounts the strange tale of the Civil War veteran whose remains will be interred (actually re-interred) here this week.

It seems a little weird to show up at the burial of someone who died decades before I was born. But how many more opportunities will there be to lay to rest the remains of a survivor of Vicksburg, Shiloh, Iuka, Memphis, and Andersonville?