Thomas, Samuel, and Priscilla were all the light of their mother’s life. But it was little Mary, Margaret Garner’s first daughter, who was her mother’s precious beloved.

Through the bitter cold and the blinding snowstorms of 1855’s Long Hard Winter, pregnant Margaret and her husband Robert had holed up together with their 4 children, until suddenly, the miserable chill became their method of escape. The Ohio River had completely frozen over, allowing the family safe and efficient passage from Kentucky where they were enslaved, to the free state of Ohio, a hub of the Underground Railroad.

And they would need it. Robert and Margaret both had individual troubles that threatened to destroy their little family. The most recent owner of their plantation was a cruel man who ruled with the whip just as surely as he ruled by his word. He’d long threatened Robert’s sale to another plantation, but repeated and ever-lengthening loans out to other slavemasters convinced the Garners that it was only a matter of time before Robert was gone forever. The babe still growing in 22-year-old Margaret’s belly belonged to her no more than her other children did, and boy or girl, had a lifetime of enslavement waiting to welcome it into the world. Winter’s brutal but short-lived punishment couldn’t begin to compare with a slave’s perpetually hellish existence.

So on the evening of Sunday, January 27th, 1856 the Garners bundled up their children and Robert’s parents hoping to cross the icy river into Cincinnati, where their family could be free. If all went according to plan, Margaret’s family would take them in until Levi Coffin himself, nicknamed the “President of the Underground Railroad,” came to carry them on to the next stop. By Monday morning, they’d survived patrols enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act and the driving snow to arrive cold, wet and hungry, but alive. With the worst behind them, it’d be just a few more hours before their allies would handle the rest of the journey.

That subsequent departure never came for the Garners. Unbeknownst to them, their master and the U.S. Marshals, unburdened by small children, elderly family members and all of their provisions and belongings, made fast time behind them and now had their cabin surrounded.

The adults knew the terrible fate ahead. IF they survived this confrontation, they’d all be sent back to their respective plantations where the retribution would be swift and without a doubt, severe. The oldest two children at 6 and 4, already knew the despair of slavery. But 2 year old Mary and 9 month old Priscilla were still their mother’s innocent girls. But not for long. Soon, they’d be expected to work, days would turn into years, and her girls would grow into women.

What came next, was no secret to Margaret, or to most enslaved women working in their master’s homes. After all, both of her girls, most likely her youngest son, and almost certainly the child she was carrying had all been fathered by her master A.K. Gaines, one of the men now pounding furiously at her door. A Southern wife’s last trimester was rather distastefully known as “the gander months,” when it was socially acceptable in some circles for her husband to take on a mistress, or enslaved woman, for his personal satisfaction. Almost like clockwork, with the exception of her oldest, Margaret’s babies were born 5 to 7 months after each of the Gaines children, and even Margaret herself was the daughter of a slavemaster.

In the chaos of her thoughts, the armed men moments from storming in, the family members scrambling to hide, and 4 tiny voices all crying in fear, Margaret made a heartbreaking declaration.

“Mother, I shall kill my children before they will be taken back, every one of them.”

Three of the four children suffered head wounds from shovel blows their mother inflicted. But beloved Mary was the last, her mother’s pride and joy, and whatever fate the rest of the family suffered would not, could not befall Margaret’s precious Mary. Just as the men burst through the front door, Margaret reached for a butcher’s knife on the kitchen table, and without hesitation, took her daughter’s life.

The scene was the real-life inspiration for Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, Beloved.

And yet, the story didn’t end there. All except for little Mary, every member of the family was seized under the Fugitive Slave Act. But Margaret’s horrifying act complicated the matter tremendously. The crime had occurred in Ohio, where black people were free. But the Fugitive Slave Act was federal decree, and allowed slave owners to cross into any state their property might be located. Margaret’s two-week-long trial became a national spectacle and the longest fugitive slave trial in history. Ohio wanted a murder prosecution, fully expecting Margaret would be granted clemency due to the poignant circumstances. Their play was also a strategic one — finding Margaret guilty of murder would require the court to acknowledge her and her child as human beings, setting a federal precedent. On the other hand, indictment under the Fugitive Slave Act would charge Margaret with depriving an owner of his property, and ultimately require that she be returned to him too.

Thousands packed the frigid courtroom for each day’s heated arguments between the attorneys and the circus in the gallery, divided by northern and southern spectators. It was just 5 years before the start of the Civil War, and the trial not only humanized enslaved black people – women in particular – for passive northerners, but also absolutely incensed southerners who saw the trial as nothing but unwelcome northern interference and egotism. Lucy Stone, a white abolitionist did her best to plead on Margaret’s behalf and simultaneously shame her owner, pointing out that “the faded faces of the Negro children tell too plainly to what degradation the female slaves submit. Rather than give her daughter to that life, she killed it. 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?”

But Lucy’s pleas for empathy fell on deaf ears, and the Garners were all deemed property to be sent back to their respective masters. Though the state of Ohio scrambled to bring their own charges against Margaret anyway, Slavemaster Gaines spirited her away, repeatedly relocating her each time relentless abolitionists closed in. Eventually, Gaines put Margaret and baby Priscilla on a ship to Arkansas, which subsequently wrecked. Priscilla was drowned, and though she didn’t succeed, onlookers reported that Margaret attempted to drown herself as well. Reunited once and for all, Robert and Margaret spent the rest of their days together in New Orleans until Margaret died in 1858, begging her husband to “never marry again in slavery, but to live in hope of freedom.”

Toni Morrison herself spoke to the heart of Margaret’s tragedy, saying “The interest is not the fact of slavery, but of what happens internally, emotionally, psychologically, when you are in fact enslaved and what you do to try to transcend that circumstance.” For Margaret, who loved her children so much that she would sacrifice herself and whatever future she had for them, if death was the only freedom to be found from slavery, better that than no freedom at all.

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