Today's Articles

People, Locations, Episodes

Mon, 01.28.1856

The Sacrifice of Margaret Garner

Painting byThomas Satterwhite Noble

*On this date in 1856, we affirm the Margaret Garner episode.  This account is one of the most notorious runaway Fugitive Slave Law cases in America.

Ms. Garner, her husband, children, and other slaves stole a carriage and fled to Covington, KY. (Boone Co.) They ran across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, like thousands of other slaves.  They hid overnight in the home of a freeman (her cousin).  But the Garners were caught when frantic Slave catchers, armed with guns and carrying warrants, arrived and demanded their "property,” Ms. Garner, her four children, and her husband.

Garner made an awful, frantic choice as she crouched with her family in a shack near Cincinnati's Mill Creek. Gripping a knife, the 23-year-old shouted that she would rather see her children die than return to slavery at Maplewood.  As the white men burst in, her husband fired several shots and wounded one of the officers but was soon overpowered and dragged out of the house.  At this moment, Margaret Garner, seeing that their hopes of freedom were in vain, seized a butcher knife that lay on the table and, with one stroke, cut the throat of her little daughter.

She then attempted to take the life of the other children and kill herself, but she was overpowered and hampered before she could complete her desperate work. The whole party was then arrested and lodged in jail. Their trial lasted two weeks, drawing crowds to the courtroom every day.  The counsel for the defense brought witnesses to prove that the fugitives had been permitted to visit the city at various times previously.  It was claimed that Margaret Garner had been brought here by her owners a number of years before to act as a nurse girl. According to the law which liberated slaves who were brought into free States by the consent of their masters, she had been free from that time, and her children, all of whom had been born since then following the condition of the mother, were likewise free.

The Commissioner decided that a voluntary return to slavery, after a visit to a free State, re-attached the conditions of slavery and that the fugitives were legally slaves at the time of their escape.  But in spite of appeals of eloquent pleadings, the Commissioner remanded the fugitives back to slavery.  He said it was not a question of feeling to be decided by the chance current of his sympathies; the law of Kentucky and the United States made it a question of property.   Margaret Garner died of Typhoid Fever in 1858 at Willow Grove.

Reference:

Library.Cincy Museum.org

Civul War Women.wp.tulane.edu

The African American Literature Book Club
55 West 116th Street #195
Harlem, NY 10026

New Poem Each Day

Poetry Corner

these hips are big hips they need space to move around in. they don't fit into little petty places. these hips are free hips. they don't like to be... HOMAGE TO MY HIPS by Lucille Clifton
Read More