Episode Details

Nineteen of twenty colonists never lived in a city. They lived on the land — and not as peasants or tenants, but as freeholders, owning the ground they worked and answering to no master for it. This episode is a portrait of that agrarian world, from the bottom up: the New England farmer raising his hand in town meeting to tax himself and school his children; the freeholder whose ownership of land made him the independent citizen the whole Enlightenment argument required; the unbroken ladder of self-government — town meeting, county court, colonial assembly — that the colonists had been climbing for a century before anyone in London thought to tax them. And above that broad base, the gentry: the Carters and the Lees in their Georgian houses, reading Cicero and drowning in London debt, the class that would supply Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. One society, governing itself at every level — and resting the whole of it on the labor of the unfree. When Parliament finally reached across the ocean to govern these people, it was not handing them a grievance. It was taking something away they had held their whole lives.