thumb|[[Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting The Modern Medea was based on Garner's story.]]

Margaret Garner (died 1858) was an enslaved African-American woman who killed her own daughter and intended to kill her other three children and herself rather than be forced back into slavery. Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. They at first found refuge but they were pursued and apprehended by U.S. Marshals and slave catchers acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It was just before Margaret was taken that she enacted the killing. Garner's defense attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for the homicide in Ohio, to keep her in a free state to challenge slavery and the fugitive-slave law in court in front of an Ohio jury but Margaret and her remaining family were taken back south into slavery. Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).

Early life

Garner, who was mixed-race and described at the time with the derogatory term 'mulatto', was born a house slave to the Gaines family of Maplewood plantation, Boone County, Kentucky. She may have been the daughter of the plantation owner John Pollard Gaines. The timing of the pregnancies suggests that the children were each conceived after Gaines's wife had become pregnant and was sexually unavailable to him.

In a contemporary account, abolitionist Levi Coffin described Margaret Garner at her arrest as "a mulatto, about five feet high ... she appeared to be about twenty-one or twenty-three years old." She also had an old scar on the left side of her forehead and cheek, which she said had been caused when a "White man struck me." Her two sons were about four and six years old, and her daughter Mary was two and a half, and baby girl Priscilla, an infant.

The escape

On January 28, 1856, Robert and Margaret Garner, who was pregnant, together with family members, escaped and fled to Storrs Township, a rural area just west of Cincinnati, along with several other enslaved families. Robert Garner had stolen his enslaver's horses and sleigh along with his gun. Seventeen people were reported to have been in their party. In the coldest winter in 60 years, the Ohio River had frozen. At daybreak, the group crossed the ice in Boone County, Kentucky, just west of Covington, and escaped to Storrs Township before dividing to avoid detection.

The Garners and their four children, with Robert's father Simon and his wife Mary, made their way to the home of Margaret's uncle Joe Kite,

Margaret Garner was not immediately tried for murder but was forced to return to a slave state along with Robert and their youngest child, a daughter of about nine months old. When Ohio authorities got an extradition warrant for Garner to try her for murder, they were unable to find her for the arrest. Archibald K. Gaines, her enslaver, kept moving her between cities in Kentucky.

Sent south and death

Ohio officials missed finding Margaret in Covington by a few hours, missed apprehending her again in Frankfort, and finally caught up with her enslaver in Louisville, only to discover that he had put the enslaved people on a boat headed for his brother's plantation in Arkansas. The Liberator reported that, on March 6, 1856, the steamboat Henry Lewis, on which the Garners were being transported, began to sink after colliding with another boat. Margaret Garner and her baby daughter were either thrown overboard during the collision or, according to an alternate account, Garner deliberately jumped overboard after tossing her baby into the river. The baby drowned. It was reported that Margaret expressed "frantic joy" that her baby had died, and that she had tried to drown herself. She and Robert were kept in Arkansas only a short time before being sent to Gaines' family friends in New Orleans as a household servant. The Garners then disappeared from sight.

In 1870, a reporter from The Cincinnati Chronicle found Robert Garner and gathered more about his life. Robert and Margaret Garner had worked in New Orleans, and in 1857 were sold to Judge Dewitt Clinton Bonham for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing, Mississippi. Robert said 24 year old Margaret had died in 1858 of typhoid fever, in an epidemic in the valley. He said that before she died, Margaret urged him to "never marry again in slavery, but to live in hope of freedom."

Garner's life story was also the basis of Frances Harper's 1859 poem "Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio". She also inspired Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting, The Modern Medea; Medea was a woman in Greek mythology who killed her own children. The painting, owned by Cincinnati manufacturer Procter and Gamble Corporation, was presented as a gift to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where it remains on permanent display.

Garner's life also inspired Toni Morrison to write her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987). Morrison also wrote the libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005), composed by Richard Danielpour. Folk musician Jake Speed's "Maggie Don't You Weep" (2003) is similarly inspired by Garner's life.

Other fiction writing inspired by Garner's story includes John Jolliffe's Belle Scott (1856), N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season. (2015)

Robert Dafford's mural "The Flight of the Garner Family" depicts the group crossing the frozen Ohio River. Painted on a floodwall beneath the John A Roebling Suspension Bridge in Covington, Kentucky, the mural is part of an 18-image series depicting events from Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky history.

See also

  • List of slaves
  • Suicide, infanticide, and self-mutilation by slaves in the United States
  • Family separation in American slavery

Citations

References

  • Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati: Western Tract Society), 1876.
  • "Stampede of Slaves: A Tale of Horror" The Cincinnati Enquirer, January 29, 1856.
  • Weisenburger, Steven. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child Murder from the Old South (New York: Hill and Wang), 1998.
  • Information about Margaret Garner the opera