"All my training tells me to cast a skeptical eye toward lore and to resist sentiment at every turn. But I can't," Thomas wrote in a 2013 op-ed."
"The law required the return to enslavers of escaped enslaved people captured in free states as well as in slave states," highlighting the complex history surrounding the property.
"Former owners include founding father George Mason's grandson James Murray Mason, who as an antebellum U.S. senator drafted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850."
"William G. Thomas III, a historian at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who lived at Clarens in his youth, was told that the site had been a hospital for Fort Williams, a Union outpost."
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