Part 4 follows two freedom suits that grew out of the Atlantic slave trade after formal bans were on the books but smuggling and corruption kept the traffic alive. We begin with The Antelope (1825), a case that starts with a Baltimore clipper that changes its name and flag, captures slave ships off the coast of Angola, and ends with 258 surviving captives, most of them children, landed in Savannah and held for years while the courts argue over who can claim them as property. U.S. attorney William H. Gibbons files on behalf of the captives themselves, and Francis Scott Key takes the appeal to the Supreme Court, insisting “by the law of nature, all men are free.” Chief Justice John Marshall calls the trade inhumane but refuses to treat abolition as universal international law, sending many captives back into a system that cannot bring them home.

We then turn to the Amistad, where Africans illegally taken to Havana revolt aboard a Cuban schooner, are seized off Long Island, and face competing claims from Spain, salvage hunters, and an American government trying to avoid a diplomatic crisis. With translation, trial proof that Spanish papers were fraudulent, and abolitionist counsel joined by John Quincy Adams, the Supreme Court affirms that the captives were free and that their revolt was legitimate self-defense. The episode closes by underlining the limit of these cases: they address the transatlantic trade, while the internal slave trade in the United States and across the Spanish empire continues to expand as slavery spreads into the Cotton South.

Part 2 follows the first major freedom case in the English speaking world, Somerset v. Stewart, as abolitionist Granville Sharp searches for a test case and uses habeas corpus to stop James Somerset from being shipped to Jamaica for sale. We track Lord Mansfield’s long delay, his final ruling that slavery is “so odious” it can exist only by “positive law,” and why the decision was widely understood as ending slavery in England, then became a foundational boost for abolitionists and a looming question for American courts after independence.

Part 3 moves to Maryland, where blurred color lines, shifting agricultural economics, and the growth of Baltimore create unusually fertile ground for freedom suits, especially claims rooted in the “mother to child” status rule and the use of hearsay to prove ancestry. We follow the Butler cases and their ripple effect, then the White Marsh litigation against the Jesuits through the Queen and Mahoney family sagas, showing how jury pools, legislative backlash, and lawyer switching shaped outcomes, and how the fight ultimately pivots to the District of Columbia with Francis Scott Key and ends at the Supreme Court in Queen v. Hepburn, a landmark hearsay ruling that helps shut down this entire strand of descent based freedom litigation.

Part 1 introduces the Freedom Trials, cases in which enslaved people sued their enslavers in court before the Civil War and, more often than most people expect, sometimes won. We start with the basic fact pattern and the scope of the phenomenon, including how historians have traced hundreds of appellate decisions and thousands of suits, then we lay out the roadmap for the full series, from Somerset to the Amistad and the Antelope, St. Louis and New Orleans, and finally Dred Scott. From there, the episode builds the foundation you need to understand how these cases could exist at all by defining chattel slavery and related labor systems, explaining manumission and self purchase, and clarifying the legal rules that structured slavery in practice, including the mother to child rule and slavery’s “double character” as both property and person. The episode closes by zooming out to show how slavery changed across time and place, how different legal traditions shaped slave regimes, and how shifting politics and ideology set the stage for the freedom suits that follow.

Part IV follows the Democratic-Republicans as the prosecutions widen and the question becomes practical as much as constitutional: who gets to decide if the Alien and Sedition Acts are unconstitutional when the federal courts and Congress are controlled by Federalists. With few options left, Jefferson and Madison turn to state power through the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, triggering a national debate over the First Amendment, federal authority, and whether states can interpose or nullify federal law. From there, the story shifts into the endgame, with a second stage of enforcement tied to Fries’ Rebellion and Justice Samuel Chase’s aggressive courtroom posture, then a third wave of prosecutions aimed at editors and critics in the run up to the election of 1800, including the sustained campaign against the Aurora and high profile cases like Thomas Cooper and James Callender. The section closes with the Quasi-War ending, the Sedition Act prosecutions stopping and then sunsetting, Jefferson’s victory and pardons, and the longer aftermath in the judiciary, including the Midnight Judges, the impeachment battles, Marbury v. Madison, and how this crisis helped shape a more modern American understanding of freedom of speech and the press.

Part 2 follows Congress as the Quasi-War fears peak and the Federalists move a package of laws aimed at immigrants and political opposition: the Naturalization Act, the Alien Enemies Act, the Alien Friends Act, and the Sedition Act. We break down what each law did, the penalties and sunset clauses, and the core constitutional fight over whether criminalizing criticism of the government could coexist with the First Amendment, including the competing Federalist and Democratic-Republican theories of seditious libel and federal court power.

Part 3 then moves from legislation to enforcement, as Jefferson warns of a coming "reign of witches" and the first wave of prosecutions begins, targeting opposition newspapers and loud political enemies. We track how the Federal court system and Federalist marshals shaped outcomes, and we follow early cases and flashpoints like the Aurora prosecutions, Congressman Matthew Lyon, the Wild Irishman cases, tavern-talk prosecutions, and the Liberty Pole cases that exposed how uneven justice could look in practice.

Part I sets the stage for the Alien and Sedition Act crisis by tracing the young republic’s first decade: the new Constitution and Bill of Rights, Washington’s cabinet, and the birth of political parties as Hamilton and Jefferson clash over finance and federal power. As the French, Haitian, and Irish revolutions convulse the Atlantic world and Britain responds with crackdowns on dissent, refugees flood into the United States, polarization hardens, and foreign policy flashpoints like the Jay Treaty, Citizen Genet, and the XYZ Affair push America toward the Quasi-War with France.

Part VIII follows the collapse of the witch trials and traces how Massachusetts tried to live with the knowledge that it had shed innocent blood. Competing narratives emerged right away, with Cotton Mather defending the proceedings in print and Boston merchant Robert Calef dismantling them in a meticulous critique that helped fix public judgment against the trials. Key participants stepped forward with formal apologies: Judge Samuel Sewall publicly confessed his guilt, the entire grand jury expressed sorrow for condemning the innocent, and years later Anne Putnam Jr. stood before the Salem Village church and admitted that her accusations, especially against Rebecca Nurse and her sisters, had been the product of a “great delusion.” Even as some leaders like Stoughton never apologized, gaps in official records and missing pages from diaries suggest a quiet attempt to erase parts of the story.

The aftermath also shows how Salem’s crisis reshaped New England’s religious and political culture over the long term. Puritan authority and the dream of a tight theocracy were badly damaged, yet Puritan legacies of literacy, covenant, and elected leadership flowed into later American reforms, abolitionism, and public education. Salem Village eventually reconciled under new minister Joseph Green and later rebranded itself as Danvers, while the Nurse family led a decades-long campaign that secured pardons, compensation, and memorials for Rebecca Nurse and other victims. Modern histories, along with works like The Crucible and PBS’s Three Sovereigns for Sarah, keep returning to these events, turning the trials into a lasting cautionary tale about fear, faction, and the misuse of law in a supposedly godly society.

Parts VI and VII trace the moment Salem's local panic becomes a legal machine, and then a colony-wide catastrophe. With the charter revoked and Massachusetts lacking a functioning high court, the early proceedings unfold through improvised inquests run by local magistrates, marked by public spectacle, presumption of guilt, and the dangerous absence of procedural restraints. Accusations multiply, and the evidentiary foundation is dangerously elastic: hearsay, gossip, and rumor flow into the record; defendants have no counsel; and spectral evidence is treated as proof, even though it can only be perceived by the afflicted. Written depositions, often recorded by deeply interested parties, become the backbone of the case file, and the process rewards confession and accusation while punishing denial. The episode follows the key early turning points, including Tituba's confession, the first executions, and the escalating controversy over whether invisible, supernatural testimony can justify a death sentence.

Against that backdrop, the trials begin targeting people whose arrests should have been unthinkable in a tight Puritan community. The accusation of Rebecca Nurse, a revered elderly church member with a large family and a reputation for piety, shocks Salem and exposes the factional and personal grievances beneath the prosecutions. Her case reveals how petitions, courtroom theatrics, and ambiguous testimony could be used to reverse an acquittal into a conviction, and how even a governor's pardon could be undone by judicial pressure. The episode then follows the expansion of the hunt to prominent men and ministers, including George Burroughs, a former Salem Village pastor whose trial relies heavily on spectral claims and insinuations of diabolical leadership. Executions, public doubt, and rising opposition begin to collide, but the machinery keeps moving, fueled by fear, coerced confessions, and an ever-widening list of enemies. By the end of these chapters, Salem is no longer prosecuting a handful of suspects. It is prosecuting a theory of Satanic conspiracy, and the law has been bent to fit it.