; Whereas, in 1861, the value placed on cotton produced by enslaved Black people was $250,000,000, or more than $8,200,000,000 today; Whereas the bodies of enslaved people, gorged and congealed in the name of White supremacist hate, became the single largest financial asset of property in the United States that were purchased through loans, repaid with interest, and insured with exorbitant policies; Whereas the vending, bartering, and selling of enslaved people, and with it the forced separation of Black families, became a self-sustaining economy bringing in trillions of dollars across the United States; Whereas White slaveowners used enslaved people as partial to full collateral in 8 out of 10 loans to access more wealth and resources, often to purchase more enslaved people; Whereas enslaved people themselves became commodities that, by 1860, were valued at over $4,000,000,000; Whereas, in 1857, in the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, the Supreme Court held that Black people were not citizens of the United States, and therefore, had no rights to be respected, thereby further codifying White supremacy into law; Whereas the institution of slavery was so powerful and corrosive that it helped to both create the wealth of the United States, and also threatened to entirely destroy the fabric of the Union during the Civil War; Whereas 78 percent of military-age free Black men served in the Union Army, and 200,000 Black men enlisted in the Union to fight during the Civil War, accounting for 1 in 10 Union soldiers; Whereas Confederate soldiers often killed Black soldiers rather than capture them, and also enslaved Black war captives during the Civil War; Whereas President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which by 1934, when the Act ended, had granted more than 270,000,000 acres of land in the West to White people virtually for free; Whereas, even after the Emancipation Proclamation, Confederate States ignored Lincoln’s emancipation order and maintained the institution of slavery