Margaret Garner Research Paper

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Pages: 3

Margaret Garner “couldn’t yet know that the physical, emotional and psychological violence of slavery, relentless and horrific, would one day conspire to force her maternal judgment in a moment already fraught with grave imperative”(nytimes). Margaret was born on June 4, 1833; her mother was a black slave and was raped by a white slave master. Margaret worked as a house slave for Archibald K. Gaines and his family. She was a light skin slave and was a gift to Gaines wife.Margaret would often travel with Gaines wife to free territories. Margaret was married to a man by the name of Robert Garner. “Margaret bore four children in 1856”(black past). History believes that 2 of her kids were from Archibald. In the 1850s the underground rail was at its peak transporting …show more content…
She escaped with her husband and his parents, as well as their four children, and crossed over the frozen Ohio River to the safe house of Elijah Kite, Garner’s cousin, a free black man living The Garnies made it to the Kites home on a Monday morning. Within a few hours her master found them. “Motherhood, across race, language, country and culture, is understood to be complicated and powerful: a tsunami of gut and joy and fear and heartache. Garner found herself in that fleeting, lightless instant of a mother’s incongruous love on a frigid night, when slave catchers surrounded her cousins’ home and when she made the decision, in one soul-chilling moment, to slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter rather than return her to slavery” (nytimes). By the time that the Marshes got there Margaret's 2 year-old daughter was dead from the butcher knife, and her other children lay wounded but not dead on the