Margaret Garner

Margaret Garner escaped from slavery in Kentucky in January 1856 and, when the slave catchers surrounded the house in Ohio where she was hiding, killed her two-year-old daughter rather than let the child be taken back. She crossed the frozen Ohio River with her husband Robert, their four children and his parents, and they reached the house of a free relative in Cincinnati, where a federal marshal's party broke in within hours under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She cut the throat of her daughter Mary and was stopped before she could kill the others or herself. The trial that followed was the longest fugitive slave case on record, running two weeks, and the question at its centre was not guilt but jurisdiction: abolitionists wanted her tried for murder in Ohio, because a murder trial would treat her as a person under Ohio law, while her owner wanted her returned as property under federal law. The commissioner ruled for the federal claim and she was sent back to Kentucky, then sold south; a warrant for murder arrived too late to be served. On the boat down the river another of her children drowned when the vessel collided, and by one account she showed no distress at it. She died of typhoid in Mississippi in 1858, aged about twenty-four, and her husband said she told him to go on living without ever going back into slavery. Lucy Stone spoke for her at the trial and the case was used across the northern press. Toni Morrison read a nineteenth-century account of it and wrote Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and later the libretto for an opera about her. The case was among the most widely reported applications of the Fugitive Slave Act and was cited by both sides in the years before the war. Her name was not on the murder warrant that was finally issued, because Ohio had by then lost the argument about whether she was a person or a chattel.

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