What made the American situation especially intolerable was not the wrongs these earliest Americans perpetrated but the high and noble ideals they professed, which served to contradict and condemn those very practices. They were living an inconsistency, and they could not be at ease about it. Washington freed his own slaves upon his death. Jefferson did not, but he agonized over his complicity with slavery and later in life foresaw slavery as an offense against God and a possible source of national dissolution. What these two examples tell us is that the seeds of a more capacious ideal of
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Washington And Jefferson slavery
