The moral injustice of compensating slave owners rather than enslaved people in 1833 is real and deserves to be stated clearly. The people who had suffered most received nothing. The people who had profited from their suffering received compensation for being required to stop. This reflected the legal and moral framework of the time, which treated enslaved people as property rather than as people with their own rights and claims.
That injustice cannot now be remedied by paying descendants of enslaved people, for reasons explored elsewhere in this section. But it is important to acknowledge it clearly, not to use it as an argument for further payment, but because honest reckoning with history requires acknowledging every dimension of it, including the ones that reflect most poorly on the decisions of 1833.
