What They Don’t Teach You in School About the American Civil War

In 1703, more than 40 percent of families in New York City owned at least one enslaved person. The only place in the British colonial world with a higher concentration of slave-owning households was Charleston, South Carolina. This single statistic short-circuits the tidy mental map most Americans carry: slavery in the South, freedom in the North, a clean line between good and evil. The reality, as this episode methodically demonstrates, was far messier—and far more revealing.

The North's Deep Entanglement with Slavery

Northern slavery was not a marginal phenomenon. In Connecticut during the 1780s, roughly one in four families held someone in bondage. In Rhode Island, one out of every fourteen residents was enslaved. The region's elite were deeply implicated: John Hancock, whose enormous signature on the Declaration of Independence made "signing your John Hancock" a household phrase, owned enslaved people. The same founders who wrote soaring words about liberty also signed bills of sale for human beings, seeing no particular contradiction.