Margaret Garner
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Margaret Garner (called Peggy) was an enslaved African American woman in pre-Civil War America who was notorious - or celebrated - for killing her own daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery. Her story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, as well as for her libretto for the early 21st century opera Margaret Garner, composed by Richard Danielpour.
Garner was born on a farm called Maplewood in Boone County, Kentucky, probably the daughter of the plantation owner. When both were 15, Margaret married Robert Garner from a neighboring plantation and had one son, Thomas, described as dark-skinned. Robert was frequently hired out to work on distant farms and Margaret's three other children (Samuel, Mary, and Priscilla) would each be born a few months after the plantation owner's own children. These light skinned children were likely the children of Margaret and her current owner, the brother of the man who had owned the plantation when she was born. Levi Coffin described Margaret Garner, at the time of 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 boys were about four and six years old, Mary, 2 and a half, and Priscilla, an infant.
On January 28, 1856, a pregnant Margaret and her husband Robert, together with family members, escaped and fled to Cincinnati, Ohio, along with several other slave families. Robert had stolen his master's horses and sleigh along with his gun. Seventeen people were reported to have been in their party. In the coldest winter for sixty years the Ohio River had frozen and the group crossed it just west of Covington, Kentucky at daybreak, escaping to Cincinnati. The party then divided to avoid detection.
Robert, his father Simon and wife Mary, together with Margaret and their four children, made their way to the home of a former slave named Kite, an in-law of the Garners, living along Mill Creek, below Cincinnati. The other nine slaves in their party made it to safe houses in Cincinnati and eventually escaped via the Underground Railroad into Canada. Kite went to abolitionist Levi Coffin for advice on how to get the group to safety. Coffin agreed to help them escape the city. He told Kite to take the Garner group 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. They surrounded the property, then stormed the house. As they pursued the fugitive slaves, Robert Garner 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 had injured her other children, preparing to kill them and herself, when she was subdued by the posse.
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The entire group was taken to jail. The subsequent trial lasted for two weeks after which the judge deliberated another two, when a typical fugitive slave hearing would have lasted less than a day. The defense attempted to prove that Margaret had been liberated under a former law covering slaves were taken into free states for other work. Her attorney actually proposed that she be charged with murder so that the case would be tried in a free state (understanding that the governor would later pardon her). The prosecuting attorney argued that the federal fugitive slave laws took precedence over state murder charges. Over a thousand people turned out each day to watch the proceedings, lining the streets outside the courthouse, and 500 men were deputized to maintain order in the town.
Margaret was not immediately 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. Ohio authorities got an extradition warrant for Margaret to try her for murder, but failed to find her as her owner, A. K. Gaines, kept moving her between cities in Kentucky. Ohio officials missed getting Margaret in Covington by a few hours, missed getting her again in Frankfort and finally found her master in Louisville, only to discover that he had put them on a boat for his brother's plantation in Arkansas.
The Liberator reported on March 11, 1856 that the steamboat Lewis, on which the Garners were being transported, began to sink. Margaret Garner and her baby daughter were thrown overboard when another boat coming to the rescue hit the Lewis. The baby drowned. It was reported that Margaret was happy that her baby had died and that she would try to drown herself.
She was kept here only a short time before being sent to family friends in New Orleans as a household servant. The Cincinnati Chronicle reported in 1870 that Robert and Margaret Garner 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 Garner died in 1858 of typhoid fever.
Garner's life story was the basis of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved and of Frances Harper's 1859 poem "Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio." It was also the subject of an opera, called Margaret Garner, with a libretto written by Morrison and music composed by the Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour. Commissioned by Michigan Opera Theatre, Cincinnati Opera and the Opera Company of Philadelphia, the opera 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. Mezzo soprano Denyce Graves sang Margaret Garner, and baritone Rod Gilfry sang the role of the plantation owner, Edward Gaines.
Kentucky painter Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting, The Modern Medea, was also inspired by the Margaret Garner tragedy. (Medea is 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.
[edit] References
- Coffin, Levi. Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati: Western Tract Society), 1876. ISBN 0-944350-20-8
- "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
- A Historical Margaret Garner, Essay by Steven Weisenburger
