The leaders of New York have grown accustomed to telling us that this state has always been and still serves as the progressive leader of the United States. Maybe in the future, New York will be the progressive leader. But New York's past is too murky and ambiguous for self-congratulations.

Before the American Revolution, New York was a very significant slave-owning state. Slavery was authorized for 200 years in New York, from 1626 to 1827. In the 18th century, New York City generally ranked second to Charleston, S.C., in the number of slaves in a city. New York was the largest slave state north of Maryland: 22,000 slaves, nearly 11.5 percent of the state's population, lived in New York at the start of the American Revolution.

Blacks continued to be second-class citizens in New York for decades after slavery was eliminated. The 1821 state constitution imposed a $250 property qualification requirement on black male voters that was not imposed on white male voters. That property requirement remained in effect for nearly 50 years, until it was removed by the 15th Amendment. In referenda held on three separate occasions, in 1846, 1860, and even, after the Civil War, in 1869, New York voters refused to eliminate the property qualification for black voters.

While the state Legislature in 1869 ratified the 15th Amendment, it voted in 1870 to rescind its approval. It was not until 1970 that the Legislature formally reapproved the 15th Amendment.

While we may associate women's rights with Seneca Falls, as late as 1915, 58 percent of the state's voters voted to oppose women's suffrage. Even today, New York has not yet added an Equal Rights Amendment to its constitution.

This is a state where the five Socialists elected to the Assembly in 1920 were expelled by the membership. Similarly, that year, the legislative Lusk Committee conducted raids on suspected Bolsheviks and anarchists, while charging that between 300,000 to 500,000 people in New York City were advocating the forcible overthrow of the government.

The state's reapportionment system has always been a means to maintain the status quo of whoever is in power. The state's electoral system for much of the judiciary, while constitutional, has been ridiculed by most every court and commission that has reviewed it. The state's constitutional provisions on voting, which were initially intended to prevent voter fraud, now work to make it more difficult to get citizens to the polls.

We have had riots aimed at blacks and Jews and deadly clashes between Protestant and Irish Catholics. Native Americans have been deprived of their territories.

Finally, as the icing on the cake, we have a history of corruption that had infested and permeated the state's political process.

Nor has the Court of Appeals during its existence been the overwhelming protector of individual rights. Prior to 1920, the state's highest court was regarded as overwhelmingly conservative. It ruled that a law banning cigar manufacturing in tenements was unconstitutional, found the state's worker's compensation law unconstitutional and ruled that a factory worker who was injured by her employer's failure to abide by the factory law could not recover damages because she had assumed the risk that came from the job.

Famed reformer Samuel Seabury in 1913, in remarks endorsed by Theodore Roosevelt, said of the Court of Appeals, "It has resorted to strained and technical construction of constitutional provisions in order to nullify remedial legislation, and a long series of decisions upon the labor laws of the state demonstrate that the court is dominated by a spirit of reactionism. Against the progress which has been made in other states and nations, the Court of Appeals stands like a rock."

While the court is now commonly regarded as the nation's leading common law court, it has hardly been a dyed-in-the-wool liberal bastion. It has ruled over the years against same-sex marriage, supported loyalty oaths, and upheld the right of private developers to discriminate by race, ruled that education was not a fundamental right, supported the Rockefeller drug laws and ruled against physician assisted suicide.

Both Govs. Thomas Dewey and Mario Cuomo talked about state government as having both a head and a heart. We do a disservice to the state's history if we fail to recognize that at times, the state government's heart and head were missing in action. As the 19th-century historian George Bancroft wrote, "That New York is not a slave state like South Carolina is due to climate and not to the superior humanity of the founders."

Nobody is saying New York's history was entirely reactionary, and New York may eventually achieve the progressive idyll. Nonetheless, New York's actual past demonstrates a disconnect between political rhetoric and progressive reality. Our fantasied legacy does not match our more conventional history.

Bennett Liebman is a government lawyer in residence at Albany Law School; over three decades working for New York state he served as counsel to Mario Cuomo when he was lieutenant governor, special deputy counsel to Cuomo when he was governor and as deputy secretary for gaming and racing under Gov. Andrew Cuomo.