| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Steven Weisenburger. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang. 1998. Pp. xiii, 352. $25.00.

Scholars of antebellum African-American and abolitionist history have long been aware of the extraordinary case of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave who, rather than see her four children returned to bondage, murdered one and attempted to kill the others before she was captured. Attention to Garner's story increased after publication of Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), a novel based on the real-life event. But until now, no one has pursued the details and presented a full account of the incident and its implications. Steven Weisenburger has done an excellent job of researching the facts of the case and placing them in the context of the struggle over slavery in the decade before the Civil War. 1

Not surprisingly, the book is at its best early on, recounting the exciting tale of the Garner family's (Margaret, husband Robert, who lived on a nearby plantation, their four children, and his parents Simon and Mary Garner) January 1856 escape from slavery in Kentucky to freedom across the frozen Ohio River. Even though we know how the story ends, Weisenburger makes us empathize with the Garners, hoping their hazardous escape will succeed. Soon after arriving in Cincinnati, however, they were discovered. Robert Garner tried to defend his family by shooting at a posse of eleven men (including both of their owners and several federal marshals) who had surrounded the house of Margaret's cousin. Margaret Garner, rather than see her children enslaved again, nearly decapitated her two-year-old daughter with a knife and was trying to kill her younger daughter (who died soon after in an unrelated accident) when authorities burst in and restrained her. . . .

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