Margaret Garner

Margaret Garner — called Peggy — was born into slavery at the Maplewood plantation in Boone County, Kentucky, in June 1834, the property of John Pollard Gaines. She was the daughter of an enslaved woman named Priscilla and possibly of a white father in the Gaines household. She married Robert Garner, the property of a different Boone County slaveholder, around 1849. They had four children across the following six years.

On the night of the twenty-seventh of January 1856, Margaret, Robert, their four children, and Robert's parents and siblings — seventeen people in all — escaped across the frozen Ohio River from the Garner farm to the free state of Ohio. They reached Cincinnati and were sheltered at the home of Robert's free Black cousin Elijah Kite. Their refuge was traced by the Garners' slaveholders within twenty-four hours under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

When U.S. Marshals broke down Kite's door on the morning of the twenty-eighth of January 1856, Margaret Garner attempted to kill her four children — to prevent their return to slavery — and succeeded in killing her two-year-old daughter Mary by cutting her throat with a butcher knife. She had wounded her three other children when the marshals seized her.

The Margaret Garner trial that followed — in Cincinnati federal court in early 1856 — was the longest fugitive-slave case in the history of the Fugitive Slave Act. The defense sought to prosecute Margaret in Ohio courts under murder charges (which would have kept her in free territory). The federal court returned her to her owner under fugitive-slave law instead. She was transported south to Mississippi, where the steamboat she was being shipped on capsized; her infant daughter Cilla drowned. Margaret was sold further south to a plantation in Boone County, Tennessee.

She died of typhoid fever there in 1858, age approximately twenty-four. Her four-day trial generated the most extensive abolitionist press coverage of any fugitive-slave case of the 1850s. Toni Morrison (also placed in this archive) drew the central narrative of Beloved (1987) from the case.

She is honored here as the woman whose impossible choice the American abolitionist movement could not look away from.