Margaret Garner

Margaret Garner (called "Peggy") was an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America who was notorious – or celebrated – for killing her own daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery. She and her family had escaped in January 1856 across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U. S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Margaret Garner's defense attorney 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 as well.

Her story was the inspiration for the novel Beloved (1987) by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey (1998), as well as for her libretto for the opera Margaret Garner (2005), composed by Richard Danielpour.

Garner, described as a mulatto, was born to Maplewood plantation, Boone County, Kentucky, a house slave to the Gaines family who lived on a farm called Maplewood in Boone County. She may have been the daughter of the plantation owner John Pollard Gaines himself.

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