Reviews in American History

On January 26, 1856, a bleak, bitterly cold day, as federal marshals closed in on a Cincinnati cabin near the banks of a frozen Ohio River, the escaped slave mother Margaret Garner killed her two-year-old daughter Mary with a single knife cut to her throat, then slashed her four and six-year-old sons until they scrambled under a bed to safety. Seizing a shovel, she delivered a blow to the face of her infant daughter before being restrained by marshals who had crashed through the cabin door. Margaret Garner’s shocking actions, whether the result of a frenzy of despair or a calculated response to an intolerable institution, provided the inspiration for Beloved, Toni Morrison’s haunting fictional treatment of the nation’s painfully real legacy of slavery. Steven Weisenburger, a professor of English, seeks to present to the reading public the actual figure upon whom Morrison’s protagonist was based. His exhaustively researched study accomplishes this task and illustrates how the scholar’s narrative and analysis complements the perceptive imagination of the novelist to provide a more nuanced portrayal of a troubled and troubling past.

Weisenburger seeks to accomplish three basic purposes, the first of which is to recreate the life of Margaret Garner and to examine the motives which prompted her to attempt to kill each of her four children. Like that of most slaves, Margaret’s life is difficult to document, and Weisenburger relies on available documents and reasonable conjecture to create his protagonist, at times relying too heavily on conjecture to determine the motives for any number of Margaret’s actions. She was born a slave at Maplewood, the plantation of John Pollard Gaines, located just south of the northern Kentucky town of Covington. When Gaines left Kentucky in 1849 as the newly appointed governor of the Oregon Territory, he sold Maplewood and its slaves to his brother Archibald at approximately the same time the pregnant sixteen-year-old Margaret wed Robert Garner, a slave on James Marshall’s [End Page 250] neighboring plantation. Over the next six years Peggy Garner would bear four children while working as a domestic in Archibald Gaines’ household. Robert, meanwhile, would be “hired out” by Marshall to various masters in the region. Archibald Gaines proved a harsh master, and so Robert, Peggy, their four children, and Robert’s parents fled across the Ohio ice bridge to Cincinnati in a desperate bid for freedom. Their escape was discovered in hours, and before Levi Coffin could spirit them northward on the Underground Railroad, marshals acting under the authority of the 1850 federal fugitive slave law surrounded the kinsman’s cabin that served as the fugitives’ way station.

Once taken into custody, Peggy Garner presented Americans with a host of dilemmas both legal and moral, and the manner in which those dilemmas were engaged in a series of judicial hearings constitutes Weisenburger’s second major theme. Weisenburger examines these issues thoroughly, carefully framing them within the social and political context of the day, tracking the arguments advanced by the escaped slaves’ abolitionist attorney, John Jolliffe, through the columns devoted to their story by Cincinnati’s pro-southern and pro-abolitionist papers. The pivotal issue, however, was the conflict between state and federal law. Was Margaret Garner to be tried for murder in the state of Ohio, or was she to be delivered to Archibald Gaines under the terms of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act? Seeking to save his clients from slavery, Jolliffe aggressively argued Ohio’s claim, challenging Gaines’ ownership of Margaret and contending that a brief sojourn as a child in Cincinnati with her master had assured her freedom, just as Robert’s many trips to Cincinnati as a livestock drover had assured his.

Determined to prevent the return of Margaret and her family to Kentucky, Jolliffe mounted a direct challenge to the constitutionality of the 1850 federal fugitive slave statute. His first line...