How Slavery Really Ended in America

by Adam Goodheart NYT Apr 1, 2011


"...As routine as the usage soon became, however, a hint of Butler’s joke remained, a slight edge of nervous laughter. A touch of racist derision, too: William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, carped, justly enough, that it was offensive to speak of human beings that way. Yet in its very absurdity, reflecting the Alice-in-Wonderland legal reasoning behind Butler’s decision, the term also mocked the absurdity of slavery — and the willful stupidity of federal laws that, for nearly a century, had acknowledged no meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with dark skin. Eventually, even black leaders adopted it..."