Margaret Garner (1834 - 1858), an enslaved African American woman in pre-Civil
War America, was born on June 4, 1834, at Maplewood plantation in Boone County,
Ky. Her parents were slaves belonging to the owner of Maplewood, so this made
her a slave from the moment she was born. When she was old enough, she became a
household domestic, waiting on the family and performing cleaning chores. Her
married master A. K. (Edward) Gaines forced her into a relationship with him.
People said he was more than likely the father of at least two of her children.
Garner became widely known when she and her family rebelled against their
bondage and made a brave escape to freedom. In the winter of 1856, she and her
husband Robert, their four children, and Robert’s parents carried out their bold
plan. The family fled the plantation and got away by crossing on foot the frozen
Ohio River from Covington, Ky., to Cincinnati, Ohio. They sought out their
family friend, a black freeman named Elijah Kite, for protection. He turned to
noted Quaker abolitionist, Levi Coffin, for help. Many referred to Coffin as the
president of the Underground Railroad. He later wrote that Garner’s case was one
that he remembered with deepest sympathy. The family meant to hide in Kite’s
home until a guide could secret them to the free North, but within hours after
their arrival, federal marshals stormed in and captured them. In a shocking
instant of grief and mental torment, the mother quickly attempted to take the
lives of her children as well as her own. They would be better off dead than
forced to live as slaves, she screamed at her captors. When the marshals found
her in a back room, she had killed her two-year-old daughter with a knife. The
other children lay on the floor, wounded but alive. The unfathomable tragedy
placed squarely in the public eye the atrocities of slavery and its existence as
a cruel institution. In January 1856, the Cincinnati Enquirer ran a sensational
article about the Garners’ arrest, which described the angry crowd that gathered
to condemn the family as they were being driven from the scene of the crime. The
author remarked, however, that the incident also produced ample material for
abolitionists who claimed the crime was a testament to the injustice of slavery.
The Garners became defendants in one of America’s most widely publicized
fugitive slave trials. The couple lost the escape case in which they pleaded for
freedom. They had to continue as slaves. Even after capture, Margaret defied the
institution of slavery. She wanted to be tried in Ohio as a free person even if
it meant she would receive the death sentence for killing her child, but
authorities refused and tried her in Kentucky as property; therefore, she was
not charged for the child’s death. Authorities later decided to charge her with
the death, but could never locate her as Gaines hid the family in various
locations and moved them from the state. In 1870, five years after the U.S.
Civil War ended slavery, the Cincinnati Chronicle interviewed Robert Garner. He
was living with his two grown sons. He had fought for the Union in the war. He
told the paper that after the trial, Gaines had sent the couple in 1857 to work
as household servants for one of his friends in New Orleans, La. Later, Judge
Dewitt Clinton Bonham purchased them for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing,
Miss. Robert said that his wife, still a slave, died in Mississippi in 1858 of
typhoid fever. Robert Garner’s death, recorded in 1871, probably resulted from a
chest injury sustained while working aboard a ship. Most likely, his final
resting place is a potters’ field in Cincinnati. Over the years, Margaret
Garner’s tragedy became the subject of theatrical productions and a variety of
works of art, including a painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, called The
Modern Medea, the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, and
the opera, Margaret Garner (2005), composed by Richard Danielpour. Her husband
said that before she died, Margaret urged him to “never marry again in slavery,
but to live in hope of freedom.”
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