Hey everyone, it's Tremaine Lee, MSNBC correspondent and host of the podcast Into America,

this Black History Month, Into America is presenting a special series,

uncounted millions, the power of reparations.

I'm exploring the untold story of Gabriel Coghley, one of the only

black Americans ever compensated for slavery. This is a story that's had my mind racing for months, wondering how this man did this, how it shaped his family, and what the implications might be for our current debate on reparations.

Our story begins in the thick of the Civil War in an

America torn between holding to its traditions of slavery and moving closer to its

messy ideals of freedom, a moment when reparations were just as

central in the policy debate as they are now.

Stay right here and listen to a special preview of the first episode of uncounted millions and search for

into America wherever you're listening now and follow.

I had this conversation with my husband and I was like, yeah, I'm going to be talking about, you know,

compensated emancipation. And he's like, oh, and slave people got money, they got compensated?

And I was like, no, slaveholders got compensated.

It's one of those jaw-dropping chapters in history,

often left out of our high school or college history books,

and rarely brought up in the contemporary

conversation around reparations in America.

Enslaved people were capital, they were like stocks if you were low on cash you sold an enslaved person and they had a precedent for

this because when the UK when Great Britain frees or emancipates its enslaved population, they compensated

slaveholders 20 million pounds.

By 1862, America was ready to do the same thanks to the DC Compensated Emancipation Act.

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