Garner, Margaret, 1834-1858
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Information for Authority record
- African American National Biography, accessed January 23, 2015, via Oxford African American Studies Center database:(Garner, Margaret; slave, fugitive slave, alleged murderer; born 04 June 1833 in Boone County, Kentucky, United States; escaped from the various Kentucky plantations on which slaves worked (1856); attempted to kill self and children, but was arrested in the process (1856); tried for murder instead of for fleeing slavery, and eventually was sent back to the South and slavery; in response to the case, the Ohio state legislature officially denounced the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; those events sparkedconflict between North and South, eventually leading to the Civil War; the family's story has been subject of various art, including a painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, titled The Modern Medea, also the basis for the character of Sethe in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, as well as the Morrison's opera entitled Margaret Garner; died in 1858 in Louisiana, United States)
- Modern Medea, 1998:CIP prologue (Margaret Garner; fugitive slave tried for infanticide in Cincinnati, Ohio, 1857)
- Kentucky Commission on Human Rights WWW site, 22 July 2011:Gallery of Great Black Kentuckians (Margaret Garner, b. 4 June 1834, Boone County, Ky.; d. 1858)
Wikipedia description:
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).
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