On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the D.C. Emancipation Act, granting immediate freedom to enslaved people in Washington, D.C., and offering up to $300 in compensation to Union-loyal slaveholders.

Lincoln envisioned “compensated emancipation,” a plan where slave owners would be paid and formerly enslaved people would be colonized abroad—to the Caribbean, Latin America, or West Africa. He hoped this would encourage border states to gradually end slavery. Congress even offered federal funds to states adopting abolition, but the plan failed as border state senators rejected it.

Before the Act, D.C. was a hub for slave trading, where enslaved people were held in pens or marched in chains through the streets.

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