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 ep ...