Though largely forgotten, even by historians, Wood’s case was widely covered by newspapers in 1878, including by The New York Times in an article headlined, “An Unsettled Account.” It was understood at the time that the case raised the question of what formerly enslaved people in general were owed. As The Times put it, “Who will recompense the millions of men and women for the years of liberty of which they have been defrauded?”

Freed people asked that question from the beginning. Present-day demands for reparations build on a long history of struggle that predates Wood’s suit. Yet her victory also stands out as exceptional in that history, a testament to both the revolutionary possibilities created by the Civil War, and their limits.

Wood’s lawsuit would not even have been possible without the Reconstruction Amendments that abolished slavery and expanded citizenship. But Reconstruction also ended without reparations, and by 1878, white Democrats had used force and fraud to overthrow Republican state governments across the former Confederacy. The counterrevolution robbed black citizens of the political power they could have used to pursue reparations laws back then, while former slaveholders and their immediate descendants still lived.

This left the judiciary as one of the few arenas in which former slaves could have advanced restitution claims. Yet that way, too, was riddled with difficulty. A court recognized Wood’s standing to sue because she had been kidnapped, “wrongfully enslaved.” For the millions of people who had been enslaved legally, the courts did not offer clear paths to reparations and Wood’s victory did not result in a wave of other suits.

The story of Callie House, another formerly enslaved woman, shows what happened when black citizens turned from the courts to Congress for relief. In the 1890s, House led a national grass-roots organization that pressured the federal government for pensions for former slaves. As the historian Mary Frances Berry has shown, however, House’s movement was killed by federal officials who falsely accused her of fraud. The Times dismissed House’s movement in 1903 as a “swindle.”