Today, we dive into a forgotten episode where the government did everything it could to help the worst people.

In The Price They Paid: Slavery, Shipwrecks, and Reparations Before the Civil War, Professor Jeff Forret (Lamar University) explores shipwrecks in the 1830s. On board were hundreds of enslaved captives. All of them survived, and almost all of them were soon free in British colonies. Afterward, the U.S. government worked really hard to make sure that enslavers received reparations for their lost “human property.”

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