Overview

In 1836, an enslaved six-year-old girl Named Med was brought to Boston by a woman from New Orleans who claimed her as property. Learning of the girl's arrival in the city, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) waged a legal fight to secure her freedom and affirm the free soil of MassachuSetts. While Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw ruled quite narrowly in the case that enslaved people brought to MassachuSetts could not be held against their will, BFASS claimed a broad victory for the abolitionist cause, and Med was released to the care of a local institution. When she died two years later, celebration quickly turned to silence, and her story was soon forgotten. As a result, Commonwealth v. Aves is little known outside of legal scholarship. In this book, Karen Woods Weierman complicates Boston's identity as the birthplace of abolition and the cradle of liberty, and restores Med to her rightful place in antislavery history by situating her story in the context of other writings on slavery, childhood, and the law.

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9781625344755

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Reviews

The story of Med is not widely known, if known at all. That alone makes this a valuable book. That it results in new readings of texts from this period, in particular Lydia Maria Child's novel A Romance of the Republic, is also exciting.--Elise Lemire, author of Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts Weierman nicely traces abolitionists' efforts to create a triumphal narrative out of Med's story. She is also excellent in tracing concerns about other cases challenging the free soil doctrine, which shifted from court to court and in different geographical contexts.--Alice Hearst, author of Children and the Politics of Cultural Belonging

[T]he author unsnarls the complicated laws regarding the status of slaves relocating to free states while demonstrating how the abolitionists ignored Med as a symbol of freedom, since her death did not fit their convenient narrative... this is an important book -- its coverage of well-meaning reformers' moral posturing and hypocrisy resonates then and now. --CHOICE

Author Information

Karen Woods Weierman is professor of English at Worcester State University and author of One Nation, One Blood: Interracial Marriage in American Fiction, Scandal, and Law, 1820-1870.

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