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William Lloyd Garrison’s 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 refused to concede any meaningful difference between a bushel of corn and a human being with black skin.
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