Tragic Erasure

Karen Woods Weierman proposes the word erasure as key to understanding the complex circulation of the term “tragedy” in the discourse concerning freedom suits. In the landmark case Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), commonly... [ view full abstract ]

Karen Woods Weierman proposes the word erasure as key to understanding the complex circulation of the term “tragedy” in the discourse concerning freedom suits. In the landmark case Commonwealth v. Aves (1836), commonly known as “the case of the slave-child, Med,” six-year-old Med was set free, but just two years later she died in a Boston orphanage. The triumphant “freedom suit scenario” had turned tragic, but the nature of the tragedy was unclear. Was the tragedy to be found in Med’s death? Or did the tragedy lie in the hubris of Boston’s abolitionists, who used a child as a test case and then abandoned her? Clearly a child martyr who died in northern freedom did not help the cause, and the abolitionists were never able to acknowledge their own fatal flaws. The result was historical erasure and silence.