In the middle of a frigid Sunday night in January 1856, a twenty-two-year-old Kentucky slave named Margaret Garner gathered up her family and raced north, toward Cincinnati and freedom. But Margaret’s master followed just hours behind and soon had the fugitives’ sanctuary surrounded. Thinking all was lost, Margaret seized a butcher knife and nearly decapitated her two-year-old daughter, crying out that she would rather see her children dead than returned to slavery. She was turning on her other three children when slave-catchers burst in and subdued her.
That’s from the book’s front flap, and is a tight summary of the facts. But this book is about much more than facts.
Margaret Garner’s child murder electrified the United States, inspiring the longest, most spectacular fugitive-slave trial in history. Abolitionists and slaveholders fought over the meaning of the murder, and the case came to symbolize the ills of the Union in those last dark decades before the Civil War. Newspaper columnists, poets, and dramatists raced to interpret Margaret’s deeds, but by century’s end they were all but forgotten.
Let’s talk about some of those symbols -- and the way they were used by abolitionists and slaveholders alike. First up, the symbol that gives the book its title.
Kentucky artist Thomas Noble painted Margaret Garner as a heroic, defiant mother confronting slave catchers over the outstretched bodies of her children, and the renowned Mathew Brady produced a lithograph of Noble’s infanticidal tableau, an image published in popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly.
Noble called his painting “The Modern Medea,” a title with deeply troubling inferences. In Euripides’ drama, a Medea already suspected of practicing the “black arts” of witchcraft kills her two children to spite their father, Jason. Jason had cut Medea to the heart by rejecting her for a racially “purer” wife; she countered by cutting off his royal lineage. Noble’s title therefore implies that Margaret Garner destroyed Archibald Gaines’s property -- and the child of their illicit union -- out of jealous rage. “The Modern Medea” thus plays on themes of miscegenation, sexual bondage, and the black woman as alluring and dangerous Other, themes nineteenth-century Americans typically spoke about in code.
That’s right. The child that Margaret kills is not just hers -- it is also the offspring of her master, Archibald Gaines. It’s a fact that our author has to piece together from the original sources available to him because, of course, it was not a fact that could be publicly discussed at the time.
A Journey Into the Past
In order to tell this tale, the author has to take the reader on a journey into the past but, surprisingly (to this reader, at least), in many ways it is not a very long journey at all.
Today travelers driving south from Cincinnati on Interstate 75 speed past the Richwood Flea Market’s tan warehouse. To the right, one mile farther west, beyond the green-and-yellow BP station at Exit 176, down State Route 338 and past the recently subdivided, gated country club community named Triple Crown, stands the same quaintly spired Presbyterian church where Margaret Garner’s owners, their neighbors, and many neighborhood slaves (included Margaret) attended Sunday services.
As one turns right at the stop sign and bears west at Richwood Presbyterian Church, the America of interstates and eighteen-wheelers seems to tumble away. Here on the road’s north side stretches the same estate Margaret’s masters once farmed in gentlemanly style. There on the road’s south side stretches the same estate of the Gaines family’s best friend, Benjamin Franklin Bedinger. There, back down the road by the church, is where Margaret’s husband and in-laws toiled for planter James Marshall. Subdivisions encroach on these lands from all sides but these old estates are still intact, still in the hands of Gaines and Bedinger and Marshall descendents. Mud Lick Creek still runs through this beautiful landscape as it did in Margaret’s time, but now it is partly banked with expensive-looking stone masonry. A magnificent new mansion with high Palladian windows graces an eastern corner of the Bedinger place, Forest Home, though Maplewood has changed remarkably little in a century and a half.
Atop a knoll sits the same house that Archibald Gaines built after a November 1850 fire leveled the original dwelling. From the road one can see the rooms where Margaret Garner and her children did domestic labor and suffered whatever indignities or threats or assaults finally compelled her to run.
In Beloved, Toni Morrison calls this place “Sweet Home.” Uncannily, here is the same land described in her novel as “rolling, rolling, rolling out before [one’s] eyes … in shameless beauty,” with its “lacy groves” of the most beautiful sycamores in the world.” The sycamores still stand with clumps of tall oaks and squatting locusts. Outside Maplewood’s front gate the Commonwealth of Kentucky has placed a historical marker commemorating it as the former residence of Major John Pollard Gaines, hero of the Mexican War and second territorial governor of Oregon.
Headstones of Gaines and Marshall family members dot Richwood Station graveyards, and their descendants still people this landscape because social and legal institutions privileged and protected their property. As for the Garners, who attempted to steal their selves in a daring resistance to antebellum slave law, there whereabouts of their graves or of any who descended from them were lost in the great diaspora of American slavery and Reconstruction. No markers or headstones for their kind in this place.
I read a lot of history. And the Civil War-era is one of my amateur specialties. I’ve even walked the ground on several Civil War battlefields, climbing the battle face of Little Round Top at Gettysburg, and following the undulating hills at Vicksburg, the tree-lined clearings and grottoes at Shiloh. And it was this passage, more than anything, that made me understand how recent this history actually is, about how the imprint of its passing is still indelibly stamped not just on our national landscape but, because of those “social and legal institutions,” on our national character and understanding. And about how all of that is only part of our national story -- some of it as lost as the whereabouts and graves of the Garner descendants.
Faces of the Past
Want to see what I mean? Want to stare at the very faces of this painful reality? Look at this.
This is the John Pollard Gaines family, ca. 1850, probably just before they departed for Oregon. The confident patriarch sits in the very center, and the careworn woman seated to his left is Elizabeth Kinkead Gaines, his wife, and the mother of his eleven children, only eight of which are present in this photo. Her husband was often away from their Kentucky home -- leaving her alone with his children and his slaves for long periods of time.
Lonely she doubtless was for the company of white adults, and careworn from work, but surely this forty-six-year-old woman was also exhausted from childbearing. In fact she illustrates most poignantly a key aspect of nineteenth-century womanhood: a wife’s lack of control over her own reproductive life, a lack profoundly analogous to what slave women experienced.
“Do you get as many children as ever?” one of the Major’s business cronies once inquired. In the Gaines tradition he did, but fell one short of his forebears’ patriarchal twelve. After her 1824 marriage Elizabeth Gaines gave birth about every eighteen months, beginning with Abner (named after the child’s grandfather). Toward the end, her births were sandwiched between John Gaines’s sojourns away from Maplewood. After she delivered her second-youngest, Matilda [second from the left in the photo], he left on a lengthy business tour to New York and Boston, and their youngest, Elizabeth (“Libby”), was born just months before he rode off with the 1st Kentucky Volunteer Cavalry on 4 July 1846.
John Gaines was an extroverted, restless man, one hungry for success and public honors, but also a man who, from our late-twentieth-century perspective, epitomizes the male chauvinism of Victorian culture. During most of the 1840s Gaines nested at Maplewood only long enough to “get” more children. By early 1849, childbearing had left his wife frequently ill, with failing eyesight and teeth. In 1848 the children rejoiced when “mother had her teeth supplied, being eight in number, which greatly improves her looks.” How did Elizabeth view her life at Maplewood? We don’t know, because none of her letters survive. She may have considered herself too unlettered to write the worldly Major, or she may simply have been too busy, like other plantation mistresses: “Challenged daily by the limitless demands of her children, a husband who believed in firm obedience from all his dependents, and the elusive wall of resistance that her house slaves formed.”
Go back and look at the faces in that photograph of the married Gaines couple and their children. His face and hers. That will tell you everything you need to know about the world that they lived in, the world of our most recent ancestors, and the world that still provides the underlying scaffolding for whatever it is that we might try to build in our modern world.
And, of course, remember that dark secret that still tries to remain hidden -- the secret that not all of John Gaines’s children were likely birthed by his careworn wife Elizabeth. Despite the difficulty of turning up direct evidence of the kind that survives to support the white lineages, Margaret’s own mulatto status is testament to this secret undercurrent of their society. The fact that white landowners fathered children with their female slaves is the widely acknowledged but never discussed undercurrent of Gaines’s world and this story. The surviving correspondence never testifies directly to this truth, but often contains slanted references, acknowledging not just the facts but the human feelings that must have existed
Trial and Treason
A large portion of Weisenburger’s book is about the subsequent trial that Margaret received after her apprehension -- and the many instances of injustice that it revealed not just because of her enslavement, but also because of the slow machinations of the process and rhetoric of the day. Her case captured the attention of the nation, and many famous abolitionists of the day came to Margaret’s defense -- some with more than just humane motivations. Here’s an excerpt from a letter John Gaines wrote at the time, complaining about their interventions and their motivations.
“I am morally sure that the Abolitionists care nothing for [Margaret], either through regard for the offended majesty of the laws of Ohio or for any sympathy with her as an oppressed, down-trodden, persecuted, heart-broken, desperate woman; and I am equally sure that the atrocious scoundrels have a wider and meaner object in view -- that they care nothing for negroes or their owners, and only wish to use both a material for the promotion of political ends, for the furtherance of objects of treason to the Constitution and the laws of the Union.”
It’s a remarkable paragraph, seeing as how it encompasses their entire world. From Gaines’s point of view, he is clearly the one acting morally, and he is outraged by the idea that the abolitionists would seek to commit treason against the Constitution and the laws of the Union. It’s a view with which the judicial process of the day will concur, but of course, with the view of history it is the abolitionists who are acting morally and it is Gaines and the judicial system that supports his view which is committing treason against the rights of man.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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