Before the Northup compensation campaign, most abolitionists talked and wrote very little about reparations for slavery. The effort to obtain a federal indemnity for Northup changed all that. After hearing the former slave relate his story at both a public lecture and private gathering of abolitionists in Boston in 1855, reformer Henry Clarke Wright not only endorsed the justice of reparations for Northup but broadened the question to the 3.5 million African Americans still in bondage. “Who will help to redeem them, and pay for their sufferings?” he asked. Like Wright, a wide range of slavery’s opponents began to call for federal reparations to slaves in the years leading to the Civil War. These included Smith, antislavery journalist and John Brown ally James Redpath, a sizeable number of black abolitionists, and southern emancipationist Hinton Rowan Helper. Some, like Smith and Helper, even offered specific plans for the size and nature of federal reparations payments to African Americans. These would be valuable precursors to later campaigns.
Many Americans are aware of the calls by former slaves for “forty acres and a mule” and even of contemporary reparations movements. Historians have added to the list the massive slave pension movement of the turn of the twentieth century. The Northup compensation campaign, however, constituted the first organized effort for federal reparations for slavery and is an important precedent. We need to include it in Northup’s story.