Margaret Garner

For the opera based on her life, see Margaret Garner (opera).
For other people named Peggy Garner, see Peggy Garner (disambiguation).

Thomas Satterwhite Noble's 1867 painting The Modern Medea was based on Garner's story.

Margaret Garner, called "Peggy" (died 1858), was an enslaved African American woman who killed her own daughter and intended to kill her other three children and herself rather than be forced back into slavery.[1] Garner and her family had escaped enslavement in January 1856 by traveling across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U.S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Garner's defense attorney, John Jolliffe, moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law. Garner's story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and its subsequent adaptation into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998).

  1. ^ Carroll, Rebecca (January 31, 2019). "Margaret Garner, a Runaway Slave Who Killed Her Own Daughter". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved June 19, 2024.