Bushrod Washington also got good mileage from Jefferson’s diffusion story. His decision to sell off enslaved people was, he insisted, not a tale of greed but a demonstration of how forced migration protected white lives. As the African Americans living at Mount Vernon grew in number, he claimed, they had become insubordinate. A couple of Washington’s slaves escaped to the North, using their feet to undermine his right to property. The rest came to believe that when he died they would be free. And the justice began to fear that they were speculating about where the sharpest knives were, and how
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