The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston by Karen Woods Weierman

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston by Karen Woods Weierman Sarah E. Yerima The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston. By Karen Woods Weierman. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. xv + 164 pp. In 1836, a six-year-old enslaved girl named Med accompanied her enslaver from New Orleans to Boston. As an enslaved child in a free state, Med possessed an obscure legal status: should she be accorded the rights of legal personhood, or did she retain the status of animate property? The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decided Med's fate in Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), when it ruled that enslaved people transported into Massachusetts were entitled to freedom. While many scholars have discussed the free-soil legal precedent set by Commonwealth v. Aves, few have considered Med's life before and after the case. Now, throughout this book, Karen Woods Weierman carefully examines Commonwealth v. Aves by placing Med, the child litigant, at the center of the suit's history. After the ruling, the newly freed Med was released into state custody. Separated from her family, she spent two years in a Massachusetts orphanage for poor, Black children before dying from an unnamed illness. How could Med have met such a tragic fate? Weierman contends that scholars must be attentive to the minor, dependent status of children who served as plaintiffs in freedom suits. In so doing, we gain a better understanding of the complicated, incomplete forms of emancipation that freedom suits often generated. For a formerly enslaved child, freedom "really meant being under the control of different adults" (41). By connecting the histories of slavery, childhood, and the law, Weierman makes a vital scholarly contribution and a compelling argument about the precarious nature of freedom in the antebellum North. The book is organized into five thematic chapters. In the first chapter, Weierman discusses the free-soil principle as it emerged in eighteenth-century [End Page 332] England with Somerset v. Stewart (1772) and compares Med's life to that of Phillis Wheatley. Both Med and Wheatley were brought to Boston as enslaved children. Both were embraced in abolitionist circles, emancipated and, eventually, abandoned by white benefactors. Wheatley, however, lived into adulthood and left behind a body of creative work. Weierman asks how we might "be responsibly creative" in using Wheatley's extant writings "to imagine Med's interiority" (28). In the second chapter, Weierman details the proceedings of Med's trial. Med's enslaver, Samuel Slater, argued that he maintained guardianship over Med in Massachusetts because he possessed ownership of Med's mother. Slater also argued that Med's manumission was wrongful since it would separate Med from the rest of her family. Med's lawyers countered that Slater could reunify the family by manumitting all of Med's relatives. Throughout this chapter, Weierman notes how each side professed its right to speak for Med while failing to ask Med what she held most important. Thus, Med's minor status made her own wishes and desires insignificant to enslavers and antislavery activists alike. The third chapter considers the contested meaning of Med's freedom. How free is an emancipated child who has been separated from her family and placed under the care and supervision of strangers? Weierman examines Med's fate after the ruling and explores the outcomes of other freedom suits with child litigants. Weierman argues that antislavery activists failed "to see beyond the freedom suit scenario, to understand what the outcomes meant for actual children, and to revise the script in response to complicated situations" (63). In the fourth and fifth chapters, Weierman follows Med's erasure from antislavery narratives in the wake of her death. Weierman first turns to commemorative efforts, noting how many memorials of Commonwealth v. Aves sought not to honor Med but to laud the ostensibly superior moral character of the free North and its white residents. Weierman then considers how the legal principles of Med's case shaped nineteenth-century realist novels about slavery and freedom. Characters partially inspired by Med were often portrayed as adults, as was the case in Maria Weston Chapman's...