Margaret Garner
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Margaret Garner was a slave in pre-Civil War America notorious - or celebrated - for killing her own daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery.
Garner was born on a farm in Boone County, Kentucky called Maplewood. On January 28, 1856, she and her husband, Robert, escaped slavery and fled to Cincinnati, Ohio, along with several other slave families; seventeen people are reported to have been in their party. They crossed the frozen Ohio River just west of Covington, Kentucky at daybreak, escaping to Cincinnati; it was then that the party divided to avoid detection.
Robert's father Simon and his wife Mary, along with Margaret, Robert, and their four children made their way to the home of a former slave named Kite living along Mill Creek, below Cincinnati. The group had to ask directions to Kite's house several times and this made them very conspicuous. The other nine slaves in their party were directed to safe houses in Cincinnati and eventually escaped via the Underground Railroad into Canada. Kite went to the business of abolitionist Levi Coffin for advice on how to get the group to safety. Coffin agreed to help them escape the city, telling Kite to return home and take them further west of the city where many free blacks lived and wait until night.
Slave catchers and police found the Garners barricaded inside Kite's house before he returned and surrounded the property. They stormed the house and pursued the fugitive slaves from room to room. Robert fired several shots and wounded at least one deputy marshal. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter with a butcher knife rather than see the child returned to slavery. She was preparing to kill her other children and herself when she was subdued by the posse.
The entire group was taken to jail and a subsequent trial lasted for two weeks as the defense attempted to prove that Margaret had been liberated under a former law when slaves were taken into free states for other work and that her children were free as they were born in Ohio; her attorney actually proposed that she be charged with murder so that the case would be tried in a free state. Margaret was not tried for murder, but was forced to return to a slave state along with Robert and her youngest child, a daughter aged about nine months. The Liberator reported on March 11, 1856 that the steamboat Lewis, on which the Garners were traveling, began to sink and that Margaret and her baby daughter were thrown overboard when another boat coming to their rescue hit the Lewis. Sadly, the baby was drowned. It was reported that Margaret was happy that her baby had died and that she would try to drown herself.
Coffin described Margaret Garner 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 other two boys were about four and six years old.
The Cincinnati Chronicle reported in 1870 that Robert and Margaret worked in New Orleans and were eventually sold to Judge Bonham for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing. In this same article, Robert reported that Margaret died in 1858 of typhoid fever.
Garner's life story is the foundation of the Toni Morrison novel Beloved, and the subject of an opera, called Margaret Garner, written by Morrison and composed by the Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour. The opera was commissioned by Michigan Opera Theatre, Cincinnati Opera and the Opera Company of Philadelphia and premiered in 2005. It set records for opera attendance in Cincinnati. In Detroit, it played to unusually large audiences with an atypically high number of African-Americans. The cast included mezzo Denyce Graves as Margaret and baritone Rod Gilfry as the evil plantation owner, Edward Gaines.
Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting, The Modern Medea, was inspired by the Margaret Garner tragedy. (Medea is a woman in Greek mythology who killed her own children.) The painting, owned by Cincinnati manufacturer Proctor and Gamble Corporation, was presented as a gift to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where it remains on permanent display.
[edit] References
Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati: Western Tract Society), 1876. ISBN 0-9443-5020-8
"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. ISBN 0-8090-6953-9
