Assistant professor Amanda Laury Kleintop’s book “Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight for Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War” was recently awarded the Charles S. Sydnor Book Prize.
The Southern Historical Association has awarded the 2026 Charles S. Sydnor Book Prize for the best book in Southern history to Amanda Laury Kleintop, an assistant professor of History, for her book, “Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight for Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War”. Kleintop published the academic monograph with the University of North Carolina Press in 2025.
“Counting the Cost of Freedom” chronicles how, after the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people. During the Civil War, the U.S. government abolished slavery without reimbursing enslavers, diminishing the white South’s wealth by nearly 50%. White southerners’ persistent efforts to recoup that cost eventually led to the creation of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which abolished the right to profit from property in people. Surprisingly, former Confederates responded by using Lost Cause history-making to obscure the fact that they had demanded financial redress in the first place. The largely successful efforts of white Southerners to erase this history continues to generate false understandings today. She demonstrates how this legal battle also undermined efforts by formerly enslaved people to receive reparations for themselves and their descendants—a debate that persists in today’s national dialogue.
According to the prize committee, “This excellent book shows that the story of the compensated emancipation movement was neither singular nor strictly regional. It transforms the way we understand the reparations movement in America.”
Kleintop is grateful for the many ways Elon has made this work possible, including financial support from the Department of History & Geography and the Dean’s Office in Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences. She’s honored to receive this award alongside her co-winner, Catherine Peyton of the University of Memphis for her book, “Radioactive Dixie: A Nuclear History of the American South”.