The argument that the 1833 compensation payment acknowledged a debt and simply paid it to the wrong people has a certain rhetorical elegance but it does not hold up legally.
The compensation was paid to resolve the legal claims of property owners under the law as it existed at the time. It did not create or acknowledge a separate debt to enslaved people. The legal framework of the time did not recognise enslaved people as having actionable claims against the state. This was itself an injustice, but it was the injustice of the legal framework, not an oversight that can be corrected two centuries later by creating a new payment obligation.
If the argument were that the state should have paid compensation to enslaved people in 1833 and failed to do so, the time to enforce that obligation has long passed. Limitation periods would have defeated any such claim within a few decades of 1833. No new legal obligation to pay arises from the mere fact that the wrong people were compensated nearly 200 years ago.
