Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South

by Steven Weisenburger

The first in-depth historical account of the events that inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved . 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 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. 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 the century's end they were all but forgotten. Steven Weisenburger is the first scholar to delve into this astonishing story in more than a century. Weisenburger integrates his innovative archival discoveries into a dramatic narrative that paints a nuanced portrait of the not-so-genteel Southern culture of slavery and its destructive effect on all who lived in and with it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Social Justice, Civil War, Race

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Steven Weisenburger works in American literary and cultural history, especially the cultural history of race, from 1800 forward. His research and teaching interests include United States history and fictions, narrative theory, African American literature, and the cultural history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, but he has also published and taught extensively on contemporary fiction and satire.

Reviews

[Geoff Sebesta · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good book about something important. Weisenburger appears to have found the answer to one of the most important questions about the Civil War; what was really behind the Dred Scott Decision?

That said, there are some interesting questions raised by how the book is written.

Weisenburger appears to have solved the problem of the proper way to discuss slavery in the modern academic context. He simply reminds the reader at every possible opportunity that slavery is bad. Everything that happens is awful. When the next thing happens, he explains how it was awful too, then helpfully reinforces it with other awful things the slave owners did, lies that the slave owners told, sins that the slave owners committed. It's quite effective, and it's a nice change from the old "neutral and objective to an absolute fault" method of writing about slavery. It also gets a little weird. I'm just not used to scholarly writers taking sides to this degree. Is it deserved? Good question.

I've read scholarly writing about all the worst things that have ever happened, from the diseases that wiped out North America to the Tiapeng Rebellion to Cromwell in Ireland. American plantation slavery is certainly among the very worst things that have ever happened, but is it actually so much worse than the Belgian Congo or medical experimentation on prisoners that Weisenburger can't contain himself? If an author can discuss the Holocaust, the Holodomor or the Gulag without reminding me every third sentence that it was bad, can't Weisenburger? Should he?

Maybe this works as an introductory text, because he really does cover the major issues of American plantation slavery extremely well, in a way that the books of previous eras simply did not. He correctly notes the enormous role of sexual servitude, of the differences between border state slavery and Deep South slavery, of the differences between the way the people of the day saw the world and the way their world really was.

But this approach seems troubling on further study. If he is correct that Margaret Garner's act of infanticide was a completely unique event that captured attention because Garner chose to kill her children as an act of political defiance, to protest her own sexual servitude and to hurt the father of her children, the man who owned her as a slave, then I am willing to agree that my judgement of her is irrelevant. I simply can't understand what drove her to do that, and the fact that the specific form of her "protest" was directly catalyzed by cultural phenomena is of interest only to the student of human nature. It has no moral bearing.

However, if I am to casually suspend judgement of infanticide, why must I heap calumny elsewhere? It's not like we're talking about some awesome, incredible, amazingly pleasant infanticide here. Maybe by killing her child Margaret Garner sped the freedom of a third of this nation (in one sense, because women getting to vote was still far in the future). But in another sense, her child was only six years from freedom, so as an armchair quarterback of history, maybe murdering her wasn't exactly the best way to help her. Garner didn't know that, and she knew a whole lot I don't know, so who am I to judge?

Obviously I am no one to judge.

So am I therefore the one to judge the slave owner? Should I judge the abolitionist lawyer, Jolliffe? Because the man was as plain a fool as I've ever read about in a history book. Should I judge the way his patently ridiculous way of fighting slavery -- by going to court and giving long speeches about how the protection of religion under the 1st Amendment meant that people didn't have to obey laws they didn't like, in direct defiance of what the Bible actually says about slavery to boot -- appears to have triggered the exact disaster of Dred Scott that caused America to become so completely intolerable that it began the inevitable slide to the Civil War that would end in the deaths of an enormous number of the people that it was meant to save? Should I judge the abolitionist celebrity Lucy Stone, whose sweet promises to the Garners came to nothing but whose dramatic courtroom appearance and sniper-sharp oratory publicly shamed Gaines, the owner of the Garners, into refusing to ever give up his "property?" If I am not, why am I to shame Gaines? Here is a man who was no better than anyone and living with, on whatever level he could face it, the murder of his daughter by a woman that he believed himself to love. Yes, the Slave South was among the most decrepit and depraved societies ever. But it was only among them, it was not the first, and this man Gaines is certainly worthy of the historical objectivity that we grant Hitler and King John.

I guess the book is so good that the guy gets to write it the way he wants to. If you're looking for a first book to read about American plantation slavery, this is the one.

[Maelynn]

Had to read for trials class 🫩

[Patty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting story, and living in the area where it happens makes it more relevant. Unfortunately, the author is so intent on discussing the facts of the case and giving details about the actual legal drama and surrounding abolitionist conflict that the human part of the story gets a bit lost. I didn't finish the book because it was due at the library (and had a hold on it) but I'm not sure I would have finished it anyways.

[Jo-jean Keller · Rating 5 out of 5]

So thankful to read Modern Medea as part of my desire to learn what I should have learned in history classes but, of course didn't because history has been white. My heart hurts with the casual cruelty of slave life.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the first non-fiction book I’ve read this year. It tells the story of Margaret Garner and her family, who escaped from slavery in Kentucky and were recaptured in Cincinnati. When surrounded by the slave catchers, Margaret turned on her children and decapitated one of her daughters. Modern Medea looks into historical records to tell the Garners story, from their escape to their capture, trial, return to slavery, and, eventually, their journey into legend.

The Garner infanticide, as Modern Medea, points out, captured the attention of the nation at the time but just a few years after, no one seemed to remember the drama. In Modern Medea, Weisenburger examines how both pro and antislavery contingents appropriated Margaret Garner as a political symbol and thus ceased to grasp the complexity of her story or her self.

Modern Medea made me think a great deal about what happens when we use people as symbols and no longer see them as complex and complicated human beings. It also made me very eager to read Beloved by Toni Morrison. Morrison was inspired by an account of Margaret Garner’s case to write Beloved. Weisenburger’s book is well-researched, nuanced, and thoroughly engaging. I would recommend it to anyone who’s interested in American literature, history, or just a solid non-fiction read.

[Denise · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book for anyone living in Greater Cincinnati. The author sheds light on what life was like for slaves, slave-owners, and those sympathetic to the fight for freedom, on a day-to-day basis. After a violent and heart-wrenching escape attempt, the reader learns of the drawn-out legal battle involving Margaret Garner and her slave owner from Boone County, KY. While the details are fascinating, they can become a little drawn-out, so skimming is recommended from time to time. The author certainly did his homework and a lot of digging to provide the details of the escape, trial and aftermath.

[Laura]

slavery,American women's history,memory

[Chuck Skorupski]

A must read. This little known episode in American History sheds more light on the horrors of slavery than any survey of America's "peculiar institution" could convey.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing research.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you read Toni Morrison's Beloved then you need to read this non-fiction account of the story of Margaret Garner, Morrison's inspiration.