Margaret Garner’s Heart-Wrenching Decision
1856
The young mother looked down into the pleading and terrified eyes of her little ones. They clutched the folds of her skirt, holding on for dear life as chaos broke out all around them. Glass was breaking, doors were being battered down, and gunshots were going off. There was no escape. Before she knew it, Margaret Garner had done the unthinkable. How had everything gone so wrong?
Margaret Garner and her family and friends had been planning to make a run for freedom for some time. She was part of a group of seventeen slaves owned by Archibald K. Gaines and John Marshall of Boone County, Kentucky, not far from the free soil of Ohio. Their plan was to wait until winter and then head to the frozen Ohio River and walk across. Margaret, who may have been expecting again, and her husband, Robert, were accompanied by their four children, two boys and two girls, as well as her elderly in-laws, Simon and Mary Garner. The youngest was a daughter just several months old.
It was a freezing cold night on January 27, 1856, when the group set out. They stole two horses and a sled from one of the master’s barns and quietly led the horses past the slave quarters. All seventeen bundled up as best they could and climbed into the sled. Horses’ hooves clopped and sled runners whispered over snow. If caught, they would be charged not only with horse theft but with absconding with their owner’s other property—the sled and themselves.
It was not yet dawn when they arrived at Covington, Kentucky, across from an area called Western Row on the Ohio River. The group tied up the horses and slipped over the frozen river to Ohio. To avoid attracting attention, they decided to disperse into the streets of Cincinnati. The slaves separated into two groups and went their own way, with hoods and scarves covering their faces and heads bent low out of the blustery winds.
The nine slaves who had belonged to John Marshall went uptown, seeking out safe houses. They would stay the night in Cincinnati before being safely forwarded along the Underground Railroad to Canada.
Archibald K. Gaines’s eight slaves that made up the Garner family asked for directions to the home of Elijah Kite, a free black kinsman who lived a few miles from the river. They found a safe haven there and warmed themselves by the fire as they discussed the next course of action. They knew full well that Gaines and Marshall were already pursuing them.
After feeding the Garners, Elijah Kite went to the office of Levi Coffin, just a half-mile away, seeking advice. Coffin, the well-known President of the Underground Railroad, told Kite to move the Garners immediately to Mill Creek, a black community outside of the city. From Mill Creek, arrangements would be made to move them along the Underground Railroad.
Elijah Kite returned with the good news, only to find his house surrounded by a posse of men, including Archibald Gaines, John Marshall, and a US marshal and his deputy. Gaines demanded that the slaves inside Kite’s house surrender. All hopes of escape were seemingly dashed. It had only taken a few hours for Gaines and Marshall to discover their slaves were missing, and they had traced their path in the snow to Cincinnati. A few more inquiries directed them to Kite’s home.
Margaret Garner had come so close to setting her four children free. She wasn’t going to give up her hopes so easily. She and the other adults barred the doors and windows; grabbed knives, clubs, and guns; and vowed to die fighting rather than be taken back to slavery. One of the windows shattered, spraying glass across the floor.
The screams of children pierced the air. There was no time to think, only act. Outside in the yard, Deputy Marshal John Patterson was grazed by a bullet fired from inside the house. The door was rammed and nearly broken off its hinges. In the chaos Margaret Garner declared that she would rather kill her children and herself than return to slavery. As the door broke down, her husband shot off his pistol, wounding one of the men before he himself was overpowered.
In the noise and confusion, Margaret looked down at her beautiful three-year-old daughter, Mary. The little child would now have to endure the same degradation and horrors that many enslaved women like Margaret suffered in submitting to their masters. She wanted to save her from the same agony.
Before she quite knew what she was doing, Margaret Garner had taken a knife and slit the throat of her dear daughter. In the confusion of the fighting around her, she then attempted to take a shovel and beat her four-year-old and six-year-old sons over the head. She would save them from the evils of slavery as well.
Margaret’s elderly mother-in-law witnessed the horrible scene but did not intervene, either stunned into inaction—or perhaps understanding she might have done the same under similar circumstances. Elijah Kite’s wife disarmed Margaret, and one of the men overpowered her before she could take her own life. The distraught young mother fell to the floor, sobbing. She cried that “she would rather kill every one of her children than have them taken back across the river.” Margaret’s daughter soon died. Her two sons, while bloody, were without serious injury. The infant was bruised in the melee but survived.
The Garner family was apprehended and brought before a US District Court in Cincinnati. They offered barely audible answers to a barrage of questions. When asked about an old scar across the side of her face, Margaret answered dully, “White man struck me.” When it was suggested that she had gone insane in killing her own daughter, Margaret answered quite clearly, “No, I was as cool as I now am, and would much rather kill them at once, and thus end their sufferings, than have them taken back to slavery and be murdered by piecemeal.”
A stunned nation read the headlines in the newspapers on January 28, 1856. The New York Times printed a telegram received from Cincinnati: “A stampede of slaves from the border counties of Kentucky took place last night. One slave woman finding escape, cut the throats of her children, and severely wounded others.” Readers grappled with the unimaginable concept of a mercy killing. What would possess a mother to take the life of her own child? Could slavery truly be so evil?
Margaret Garner was arrested in Cincinnati on a criminal charge of murder, and her husband and parents were arrested for complicity in murder. The Garner trial lasted two weeks. The Garners’ lawyers, Jolliffe and Getchell, intended to prevent the Garners from being returned to their master. At first they argued that since the Garners had previously been brought to Ohio by their owner, they were technically free at the time they had tried to escape. US Commissioner John Pendry, who was hearing the case, overruled that argument. He found that if the Garners had voluntarily returned to the slave state of Kentucky, they had relinquished their claim to freedom.
Jolliffe next wanted the state to have his clients arrested for murder, which would prevent their return to Kentucky—and the clutches of their master, Archibald Gaines. He was fully confident that no court would find the young mother guilty, for she had heartily believed it better to free her children’s souls than have them endure a life of slavery. A jury would certainly be sympathetic to her plight.
In the end, the rights of the slave owners prevailed over the right of the state of Ohio to seek punishment for murder. Abolitionists appealed to Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, who supported the state’s claim that the fugitives were free people, but even he could not prevent the Garners’ return to slavery. The state’s writ of habeas corpus compelling the Garners to be brought before the court was ignored by the US marshal. Five weeks after the incident, the Garners were remanded to Archibald Gaines, who then sold them to the Deep South.
As if there had not already been enough tragedy in their family, the ship transporting the Garners had an accident at sea. In the collision some of the slaves who were in chains were hurled overboard. Margaret Garner, with her infant in her arms, either fell into the water or jumped. She was saved, but the baby was drowned. As Margaret saw it, two of her children had now been rescued from a doomed life of slavery.
While some found Margaret Garner’s actions to be barbaric, others found them noble. In either case, the public was forced to consider the cruel effects of slavery, both physical and psychological. Margaret was never set free until her own death a few years later in 1858 from typhoid fever. She was about twenty-five years old.
Ohio-born author Toni Morrison was moved by Margaret Garner’s horrifying ordeal. Her 1987 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Beloved found seeds of inspiration in certain aspects of the young mother’s tragic life.