BY MARGARET A. McGURK
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[garner]](/editions/1998/10/02/garnerpainting_200x133.jpg)
Thomas Satterwhite Noble's painting of Margaret Garner killing her daughter rather than letting her be returned to slavery.
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| Margaret Garner's story |
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Toni Morrison's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel Beloved, the basis for the film of the same name, owes its central drama to an incident that occurred in Cincinnati 142 years ago.
Though inspired by a true incident in the life of a slave named Margaret Garner, Beloved is not an historical account.
The film does depict a woman who flees from Kentucky to Cincinnati, as Ms. Garner did on Jan. 28, 1856, in the company of her four children, her husband, Simon Jr. , and his parents.
Simon and the elder Garners came from one farm, Margaret and her children from another. They crossed the frozen Ohio River together and made their way to the home of Elijah Kite, a former slave active in the Underground Railroad.
Slave owners and other Kentuckians followed, and with a posse formed by the U.S. marshal in Cincinnati, went to the Kite house. A deputy tried to break down the door. Simon Jr. shot and wounded him.
According to newspaper reports at the time, Margaret cried, "Before any of my children will be taken back into Kentucky, I will kill every one of them." She grabbed a knife and cut the throat of her 3-year-old daughter, then slashed at the other children while the Kites and Garners tried to restrain her.
The posse rushed in, and Margaret grabbed a shovel and tried to fight before she was overpowered.
The little girl died and Margaret was charged with murder by Hamilton County officials; she faced certain hanging if she had gone to trial.
Instead, she faced a hearing on whether she and her family should be returned to Kentucky under the federal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. The Feb. 1-14 hearing was covered in newspapers across the country.
Every day, crowds lined the streets as the family was taken from the jail to the court. Free blacks cheered, sang freedom songs and taunted the pro-slavery Kentuckians who had been deputized as marshals. One of them, A.O. Russell, said years later that the experience moved him to become a Republican, and fight for the Union.
Among the abolitionists who attended the hearing was the feminist pioneer Lucy Stone Blackwell, who was accused at one point of trying to help Margaret Garner commit suicide by smuggling a knife into the jail.
Confronted with the charge, Ms. Blackwell said, "If I were a slave, as she is a slave, with the law against me, and the church against me, and with no death-dealing weapon at hand, I would with my own teeth tear open my veins, and send my soul back to God who gave it."
On March 1, U.S. Commissioner Edward S. Leavitt ruled in favor of the slave owners.
The Garner family was placed on a river boat headed to New Orleans to be sold at the slave markets in Mississippi; early in the morning of March 10, it hit another vessel and sank.
Margaret Garner was rescued, but her infant daughter drowned. The Louisville Courier-Journal reported that "the mother exhibited no other feeling than joy at the loss of her child."
She was put on board another steamer and sent back to slavery. She died of typhoid fever in Mississippi two years later.
![[garner]](/editions/1998/10/02/garnerpainting_500x332.jpg)