What Americans know about freedom we learned in the school of slavery. Those in our past who spoke the language of liberty always had in mind - and often in view - shackles on the legs and manacles on the wrists of the enslaved. At the height of the revolutionary conflict, George Washington, our greatest apostle of freedom but also the owner of hundreds of slaves, warned that if the Americans did not resist British tyranny they would become "as tame and abject slaves as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway." In other words, whites and blacks could both become equally abject slaves or be able to enjoy liberty.

New York has preeminently been the capital of American liberty, the freest city of the nation - its largest, most diverse, its most economically ambitious, and its most open to the world. It was also, paradoxically, for more than two centuries, the capital of American slavery. As many as 20% of colonial New Yorkers were enslaved Africans. First Dutch and then English merchants built the city's local economy largely around supplying ships for the trade in slaves and in what slaves produced - sugar, tobacco, indigo, coffee, chocolate, and ultimately, cotton. New York ship captains and merchants bought and sold slaves along the coast of Africa and in the taverns of their own city. Almost every businessman in 18th-century New York had a stake, at one time or another, in the traffic in human beings.

During the colonial period, 41% of the city's households had slaves, compared to 6% in Philadelphia and 2% in Boston. Only Charleston, South Carolina, rivaled New York in the extent to which slavery penetrated everyday life. To be sure, each slaveholding New Yorker usually owned only one or two persons. In the urban landscape, there were no plantations. Slaves slept in the cellars and attics of town houses or above farmhouse kitchens in the countryside. They did virtually all of the work of many households - bringing in the firewood, the water, and the food; cleaning the house and the clothing; removing the wastes. They were vital to the work of early craftsmen and manufacturers, and many became skilled artisans themselves. And they performed almost all the heavy labor of building New York's infrastructure. Slaves constructed Fort Amsterdam and its successors along the Battery. They built the wall from which Wall Street gets its name. They built the roads, the docks, and most of the important buildings of the early city - the first city hall, the first Dutch and English churches, Fraunces Tavern, the city prison and the city hospital.

Slavery was no milder in the urban North than in the Deep South. Instances of abusive treatment permeate public and personal records. White New Yorkers were sitting on a powder keg, and they knew it. The city's Common Council passed one restrictive law after another: forbidding blacks from owning property or bequeathing it to their children; forbidding them to congregate at night or in groups larger than three; requiring them to carry lanterns after dark and to remain south of what is now Worth Street; threatening the most severe punishments, even death, for theft, arson, or conspiracy to revolt - and carrying out these punishments brutally and publicly time and again.

Finally, slavery lasted a long time in New York, for fully 200 years, until it was abolished in 1827 - more than four decades after its demise in Vermont, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. Even then, the abolition of slavery in New York was linked to severe political disfranchisement. Only the 15th Amendment to the Federal Constitution, effective in 1870, guaranteed that black New Yorkers would have equal access to the ballot with their white fellow-citizens.

One explanation: in the years leading up to the Civil War, the distinction between slave states and free states became fixed in the popular mind and in school texts. Reading backwards, many northerners came to believe that their communities had always been bastions of liberty. But slavery was an important feature of every one of the thirteen colonies.

The New-York Historical Society will use the most sophisticated exhibition techniques to communicate this largely unknown story to the widest audiences possible. The entire first floor of the Society, almost 9,000 square feet, will be devoted to this exhibit, the largest thematic exhibition in the 200-year-old history of this great cultural institution. Multi-media presentations, computer-interactive learning devices, and elegant graphic design will help visitors make sense of this powerful and dramatic story.

The exhibition will bring together treasures from many great repositories: the "Duke's Map," from the British Library, noting the moment that the place was first called New York; Director-General Kieft's granting of half-freedom to eleven New Amsterdam blacks in 1644, from the New York State Archives; the charter of the Royal African Company, from the Bodleian Library at Oxford; records of the British occupation of New York during the Revolution, from Colonial Williamsburg; and paintings, documents, and objects from the Museum of the City of New York, the New York Public Library, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Municipal Archives of New York City.

But most of all, it is the richness of the New-York Historical Society's own collection that will be featured in the exhibition. No exploration of American slavery could be mounted without these treasures: the earliest watercolor view of Dutch New Amsterdam and the earliest portrait of one of its people (Peter Stuyvesant in 1660); volumes of business correspondence from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New York; the ledger books of slaving voyages; dozens of bills of sale and ads for runaway slaves; hundreds of objects - silver, furniture, metalwork - produced and maintained by enslaved New Yorkers, and subsequently donated to the Society; the manuscript records of the first abolition society in New York and of the African Free School; the earliest paintings of black New Yorkers; long runs of important newspapers documenting the struggle for American independence and against slavery.

The exhibits will be uncompromising in their dedication to historical accuracy. But their messages will, we believe, be ultimately uplifting, even inspiring. As little as we know about the material benefits brought to New York by the "peculiar institution," we know even less and can now profit more from the spiritual, moral, and political lessons derived from examining this part of our past.

In confronting, resisting, and eventually defeating an institution as powerful as chattel slavery, black New Yorkers and their white allies forged the tools of freedom that all Americans treasure today. The records that document their oppression are, if one reads them carefully, evidences of just how creative and passionate they were in their quest for liberty.

1. With every obstacle in their way, the enslaved were able to form and nurture families, to overcome frequent loss and separation, and to pass along cultural legacies to their children.
2. First to arrive every market day to sell food and the products of their idle moments, they were the first New Yorkers to demonstrate that amazing combination of street smarts and entrepreneurial energy seen nowhere else on earth.
3. Disparaged for their passivity, they were twice able to shake the eighteenth-century British Empire with their revolts against slavery in New York.
4. Taken for granted by their Patriot slaveholding masters, they were acknowledged to be among the most valiant fighters on the British side during the Revolutionary War.
5. Mocked for their crudeness during slave times, they were able to fashion the musical, dance, and theatrical traditions that have been at the core of American culture ever since.
6. Without abandoning a treasured memory of African homelands, they came together to create a dynamic form of African American religion that continues to inspire today.
7. Deprived of the right to vote in the 1820s, they organized political pressure groups, created a lively press, and shaped a political rhetoric that has been at the heart of every civil rights movement in the United States and around the globe ever since.

In sum, the black New Yorkers who survived enslavement left us legacies that shape life in this city and nation every day. Having persisted through our worst moments, they help us see the best in ourselves. The New-York Historical Society exhibits will uncover what has too long been hidden in our past and help us find the resources to continue our long national experiment with liberty.