Karen Woods Weierman, The Case of the Slave-Child, Med: Free Soil in Antislavery Boston. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. Pp 184. $90.00 hardcover, $26.95 paperback.)
IN late August 1836, a six-year-old enslaved African American girl named Med, brought to Boston the previous May by her enslaver Mary Slater, was the subject of a successful and legally critical habeas corpus case known as Commonwealth v. Aves. Liberated from slavery but separated forever from her mother and siblings, who had remained in New Orleans with Mary's husband Samuel and apparently the Slaters’ other enslaved African Americans, Med was put into the care of a recently founded “asylum” for poor African American children who were orphaned or in need of care. Two years later, Med died of an illness. Could more have been done?
Karen Woods Weierman's Case of the Slave-Child, Med aims to recover Med's history. Her...