Presiding Officer Training module 2024 lok sabha elections
Margaret Garner, Slave Mother Who Killed Her Child to Avoid Slavery, Inspiration for Beloved
1.
2. Our author Levi Coffin
remembers, “Perhaps no
case” regarding “fugitive
slaves attracted more
attention and aroused
deeper interest and
sympathy than the case
of Margaret Garner, the
slave mother, who killed
her child rather than see
it taken back to slavery.”
The Modern Medea, by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, 1867, was based on Margaret Garner's story.
3. This is a troubling story. I do not wish to morally condone
the actions of our slave mother Margaret Garner, as taking
a life can never be morally justified. But there is historical
precedent for this action: at Masada, the Jewish rebels
who were resisting the Roman soldiers, whose siege
engines overcame their armed citadel, slaughtered their
wives and children rather than succumb to the Romans,
who would have enslaved them, enslaving many of the
girls as concubines.
5. Rather, we should try to understand why a loving
slave mother would seek to sacrifice her children
rather than condemn them to a life of slavery.
Historically, sexual abuse of slaves was a problem
under all systems of slavery where women were
enslaved.
7. The story of Margaret Garner was an inspiration for
Tony Morrison’s novel Beloved. I am not a fan of
Beloved, and I am not alone, and you can ponder my
prior reflection.
10. “In January 1856, the Ohio River was
frozen over,” enabling our fleeing
Kentucky slaves a few miles from the
river to attempt an escape to
freedom. On one dark Sabbath night
our small group of seventeen slaves,
“having managed to get a large sled
and two good horses belonging to
one of their masters,” “started on
their hazardous journey.” On reaching
the river, they abandoned the sled
and horses and quickly crossed the
frozen river into Ohio, splitting up so
they would not attract attention.
From Uncle Tom’s cabin
11. Margaret Garner and her party made their way to the house of Joe Kite, a former
slave who was now free, who lived near the river, but unfortunately had to ask
directions from some white neighbors. After they arrived at his house, Kite then
traveled to the house of Levi Coffin to ask for advice on how to proceed, and our
author told him to immediately escort them to the next stop on the Underground
Railroad to conduct them to safety and freedom.
This delay proved fatal, the next day their pursuers surrounded the house of Joe
Kite, demanding the return of the fleeing slaves. A few years earlier the Fugitive
Slave Act of 1850 had been passed as part of the Missouri Compromise, which
futilely attempted to prevent strife between the Northern and Southern states. This
act compelled northern citizens to assist in returning runaway slaves to their former
masters.
12.
13. Soon after he returned, Joe
Kite’s “house was
surrounded by pursuers,
the slave masters with
officers and an armed
posse. The door and
windows were barred, and
those inside refused to
admit them. The fugitives
were determined to fight,
and to die, rather than to
be taken back to slavery.”
14. “Margaret, the mother of four children,” and
pregnant, “declared that she would kill herself
and her children before she would return to
bondage. The slave men were armed and
fought bravely. The window was first battered
down,” “and one of the deputy marshals
attempted to enter, but a pistol shot caused a
flesh wound and caused him to abandon the
effort.” “Margaret’s slave husband fired
several shots, and wounded one of the
officers, but was soon overpowered and
dragged out of the house.”
Buy us too, by Henry Louis Stephens,
Library Company of Philadelphia, 1863
15. “Margaret Garner, seeing that
their hopes of freedom were
vain, seized a butcher knife that
lay on the table, and with one
stroke cut the throat of her little
daughter, whom she loved the
most. She then attempted to
take the lives of her other slave
children and to kill herself, but
she was overpowered and
hampered before she could
complete her desperate work.
The whole party was arrested
and lodged in jail.”
The Sale / Blow for Blow, by Henry Louis Stephens, 1863
16. Why Did Margaret Slaughter Her Children?
The Modern
Medea, by
Thomas
Satterwhite
Noble, 1867,
was based on
Margaret
Garner's story.
17. What drove Margaret Garner to slaughter her slave
children? Possibly her first master, John Pollard
Gaines, may have been a kind master, Dr Wikipedia
does not say. She had married Robert Garner,
another slave, and had taken his name rather than
the name of her master, and they had a child
together. But then the slave family was sold to his
younger brother, Archibald Gaines.
18. Margaret Garner herself
was a mulatto, whose
features suggested she had
about one-fourth white
blood. “On the left side of
her forehead was an old
scar, and on the cheekbone,
on the same side another
scar.” When in her trial she
was “asked what caused
them, she simply said,
‘White man struck me.’”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4bz_Pv4PUw
19. Our author describes the appearance of Margaret
Garner and her children during her trial. “She
appeared to be twenty-two years old.” “She was
dressed in dark calico, with a white handkerchief
pinned around her neck, and a yellow cotton
handkerchief, arranged as a turban, around her
head. The babe she held in her arms was a little girl,
about nine months old, who was much lighter in
color than herself, light enough to show a red tinge
in her cheeks. During the trial, Margaret would look
up occasionally, for an instant, with a timid,
apprehensive glance at the strange faces around
her, but her eyes were generally cast down.”
20. “Margaret’s baby was continually fondling her
face with its little hands, but she rarely noticed it,
and her general expression was one of extreme
sadness. The little boys, four and six years old,
were bright-eyed, wooly-headed little fellows,
with fat dimpled cheeks. During the trial they sat
on the floor near their mother, playing together
in happy innocence, all unconscious of the gloom
that shrouded their mother, and that their own
future liberty was at stake. The murdered child
was almost white, a little girl of rare beauty.”
He Died For Me, by Henry Louis Stephens, 1863
21. Margaret Garner was a nurse girl and house slave for
Archibald Gaines’ family. In all systems of slavery, in
ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and in the antebellum
South, often house slaves led better lives than the
more numerous field slaves on the large plantations.
23. Indeed, in the ancient Greek culture, household slaves
were formally considered as part of the household.
But there was a dark side to female house slaves, in all
systems of slavery they were more subject to the lusts of
their masters. Margaret Garner’s three younger children
were also mulatto, their slave master was likely the father.
If she were returned to slavery, not would she be raped
many times more, but her daughters also, once they
reached puberty.
25. Slave Auction in Virginia. Illustration for The Illustrated London News, 1861
Was Margaret Garner a Person or Property?
26. Margaret Garner’s case was publicized in William
Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator.
Usually, hearings under the Fugitive Slave Act lasted
only a day, but this case was more complex. The key
question facing the Ohio court was this: Would
Margaret Garner be tried as a person, or was she
merely property?
27. https://youtu.be/kmLg8CDjOOY
This question was decided a year later, in the 1857 Supreme Court
Dred Scott Case, one of the sparks igniting the Civil War, where
the Southern Chief Justice Robert Taney ruled that black slaves
“had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of
an inferior order,” “and so far inferior, that they had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro
might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.”
28. If Margaret Garner and her sacrificed daughter were
considered to be persons, then she could be tried for
murder. Otherwise, this would merely be a crime
against property.
29. During the trial, the antislavery
activist Lucy Stone recalled her
discussions with Margaret Garner,
testifying that “the faded faces of
the Negro children tell too plainly to
what degradation the female slaves
submit. Rather than give her
daughter to that life, she killed it. If
in her deep maternal love, she felt
the impulse to send her child back to
God and the angels, to save it from
coming woe, who shall say she had
no right not to do so?”
30. Under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act,
the judge ordered that the runaway slaves,
including Margaret Garner, be returned to their
masters. Subsequently, an Ohio court indicted
Margaret for murder, which would provide the
Ohio governor an opportunity to pardon her,
but her master moved her between several
cities in Kentucky. When she was sent down the
river to evade the serving of the indictment,
“she sprang from the boat into the water with
her babe in her arms; and when she rose, she
was seized by some of the boat hands and
rescued, but her child had drowned.”
32. We will be reviewing many of the stories about slaves
escaping to freedom in the Underground Railroad,
and there are other slave narratives. Frederick
Douglass escaped from slavery when the abolition
movement began. Augustine Tolton and his mother
escaped from slavery during the Civil War, he was the
first black priest ordained after the Civil War. And
Booker T Washington was emancipated as a young
teenager at the end of the Civil War.
34. In our first video in this series, Harriet Jacobs sailed for freedom after hiding for
many years on her plantation.
We read of Eliza Harris who escaped with her infant daughter crawling from one
block of ice to another, crossing a river not quite frozen over in the winter, with
slave catchers watching helplessly on the bank. This incident inspired a scene in
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel that helped spark the Civil War.
Harriet Tubman was perhaps the most famous conductor on the Underground
Railroad, she returned to Maryland nineteen times to lead family members and
other slaves to freedom, and even assisted in a military raid in South Carolina during
the Civil War.
We reflect on the amusing story of Henry Box Brown, who had himself boxed up
and shipped to freedom in Philadelphia.