Listening for Silences: The Trap of Biased Sources

Abstract

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 case, Aves, is well-known to legal historians for Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw’s ruling that because no positive law in Massachusetts recognized the existence of slavery, slaves brought voluntarily into the state could not legally be held against their will or compelled to leave and therefore could succeed on a habeas corpus claim. Given the propensity of Americans with means to travel for business and pleasure, this judgment was a blow against those Southerners who liked to bring their slaves with them when they visited Massachusetts. Shaw’s judgment did not touch fugitives—selfliberating people escaping from slavery—but it nonetheless turned up the heat another few degrees in relations with the South. This was especially so because, less than three weeks earlier, Shaw had ruled that two women claimed as slaves from Maryland had been unlawfully detained by the master of a ship at the behest of the enslaver