Margaret Garner

Uncommon card · No. 191148

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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