Margaret Garner

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).

Garner, described as a mulatto, was born a house slave to the Gaines family of Maplewood plantation, Boone County, Kentucky.

[2] In a contemporary account, abolitionist Levi Coffin described Margaret Garner at her arrest as "a mulatto, about five feet high ... she appeared to be about twenty-one or twenty-three years old."

At daybreak, the group crossed the ice in Boone County, Kentucky, just west of Covington, and escaped to Storrs Township before dividing to avoid detection.

[4] The Garners and their four children, with Robert's father Simon and his wife Mary, made their way to the home of Margaret's uncle Joe Kite,[2] who had himself been formerly enslaved, and who lived along Mill Creek below Cincinnati.

The defense attempted to prove that Margaret Garner had been liberated under a former law covering slaves taken into free states for other work.

On the closing day of the trial, the antislavery activist Lucy Stone took the stand to defend her earlier conversations with Margaret (the prosecution had complained).

If in her deep maternal love she felt the impulse to send her child back to God, to save it from coming woe, who shall say she had no right not to do so?

[5] Margaret Garner was not immediately tried for murder but was forced to return to a slave state along with Robert and their youngest child, a daughter of about nine months old.

The Liberator reported that, on March 6, 1856, the steamboat Henry Lewis, on which the Garners were being transported, began to sink after colliding with another boat.

[7] Robert and Margaret Garner had worked in New Orleans, and in 1857 were sold to Judge Dewitt Clinton Bonham for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing, Mississippi.

The painting, owned by Cincinnati manufacturer Procter and Gamble Corporation, was presented as a gift to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where it remains on permanent display.

Other fiction writing inspired by Garner's story includes John Jolliffe's Belle Scott[8] (1856), N. K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season[9] (2015), and K. A. Simpson's A Coven's Lament (2017).

Robert Dafford's mural "The Flight of the Garner Family" depicts the group crossing the frozen Ohio River.