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

Steven Weisenburger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"This is a story of slavery and child-murder, and it begins in northern Kentucky."

Toni Morrison's Beloved was based on a real incident: an 1856 infanticide committed by 22-year-old Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who, when recapture was imminent, cut her daughter's throat with a butcher's knife. "The ensuing public opinion battle raged for months," writes Steven Weisenburger. For the abolitionist movement, "no case more incisively revealed the pathology of slavery, and no deeds better symbolized the slave's tragic heroism." But to those in favor of slavery, "her deeds demonstrated that slaves were subhuman. Only a beast would kill its offspring, they reasoned, so Margaret's child-murder proved the bondservant's need for Southern slavery's kindly paternal authority."

Weisenburger's account of Garner's life has a novelistic flair of its own, laying out the facts in crisp detail. He guides readers through the controversial month-long trial and its aftermath, with her return into bondage and, for a time, obscurity. Modern Medea provides a rich understanding of the realities of life in the antebellum South and the legal and cultural battles that took place over the institution of slavery.

From Library Journal

The events that inspired Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved (LJ 9/1/87), recently released as a film starring Oprah Winfrey, are the subject of this true account by Weisenburger (English, Univ. of Kentucky; Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel, Univ. of Georgia, 1995). The gruesome act of Margaret Garner, who killed her children rather than allowing them to be slaves ("Let us go to God rather than go back to slavery"), touched off a firestorm of controversy just a few years before the Civil War. Weisenburger is the first scholar to attend to this drama that uncovered dirty truths about our nation's past and the burning drive to escape bondage. He details not only the crime of infanticide and a desperate mother but skillfully portrays the country, the South, and the lives of both slaves and whites. Weisenburger integrates scholarly research and a fine narrative approach in relating this "drama of disunion, a prelude to fratricidal war."?Kay Meredith Dusheck, Univ. of Iowa, Anamosa
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub; 1st edition (October 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809069539
• ISBN-13: 978-0809069538
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,037,971 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The story behind (or beside) Morrison's Beloved, December 11, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (Hardcover)

Weisenburger, with a meticulous eye and a careful hand, vividly retells the story of Margaret Garner, whose case (or rather, one account of whose case) was the seed from which Toni Morrison grew the central stalk of her novel Beloved. It is not exactly facts that he gives us -- Weisenburger is too careful a critic, too aware of the complex nature of the historical record -- but around what facts can be found, he has written a novel of his own, one which richly complements Morrison's though-experiment with the historical legacy of slavery.

Garner's case, though little recalled today, was far better known in its day than many readers of Morrison's novel may realize. The best-known lawyers and abolitionists of the day argued Garner's case, and newspapers across the country reported the story. The most fascinating aspect of the story is the account of the competing legal and rhetorical strategies used to try to free Garner -- or, if she could not be freed, to give her the greatest possible symbolic value for the cause.

Garner's act -- killing one of her children rather than allowing het to be returned to slavery -- placed her between two contrary legal systems. Within the slavery system, and the Federally- administered Fugitive Slave Act, Garner was a piece of property to be returned. Yet within Ohio law, as a person accused of murder, she was subject to persecution for her crime as a human being. Her lawyer, paradoxically, had to persuade a judge to issue a writ for her arrest for murder, in order to prevent her from being returned to Kentucky as a slave -- it was in fact her one hope.

Weisenburger details how, in the end, this defense too failed, partly due to the complicity of certain Ohio officials with the Kentucky counterparts, and partly due to the inaction of then-governor of Ohio Salmon Chase. The actual tale of Margaret Garner, strangely enough, is even more tragic than that of Morrison's Sethe. Margaret was shipped off to cotton-belt slavery with relatives of her Kentucky owner, losing a second child to a streamboat accident en route, and evenrually died a horrible death from typhoid fever.

I'd recommend this book to anyone engaged by Morrison's novel, or by the recent film -- not as 'the fact behind the fiction,' but instead as a vital counterpoint, an *other* story of Margaret Garner, a woman who stood at the razor's edge of on of American history's most brutal junctures.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting story, well written, October 31, 1999

By 

D. C. Carrad "augustabookman" (Augusta, GA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (Paperback)

Very well done indeed. I am impressed that an English professor could turn in such good work as an historian and cover the courtroom battles with the skill of an experienced lawyer. A well told story of an obscure, but very revealing, chapter in the period just before the Civil War.

Minor criticisms: Too much is devoted to courtroom battles at the expense of describing daily slave life. As the author is a professor at a late 20th Century American university, he feels it necessary from time to time to wave his little red PC book in the air and shout slogans: Slavery was evil! Racism is not nice! Well, duh. None of this adds to the book and all of it detracts from the book.

Still, this is a good read. Buy it; you won't be disappointed. (By the way, I have never read Toni Morrison's "Beloved"; one doesn't need to in order to enjoy this book.)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A true story of slavery and infanticide, May 16, 2004

By 

gac1003 "gac1003" (Long Beach, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South (Hardcover)

In February 1857, slave Margaret Garner fled from her master Archibald Gaines's Kentucky plantation. She, her husband Robert, his parents, and their four children crossed the frozen Ohio River in Cincinnati, hiding out in the cabin of one of Margaret's cousins, a free black. Gaines quickly trailed them to the cabin, and, in one quick moment, Margaret picked up a knife and killed one of her children, not wanting any of them to go back into slavery.

In "Modern Medea," author Steven Weisenburger uses court documents, newspaper stories and other sources from the time to examine this almost-forgotten trail that challenged the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. We follow along with the entire trial, seeing all the tricks that both defense and prosecution lawyers used to either bring a quick end to proceedings or to protract them in order to keep the Garners on free soil. The trail also gives us an interesting look into politics, the pro-slavery mindset, abolitionism view, and the media perception and bias of the time.

What I found most interesting about this book is that the trial to determine whether or not the Garner's were still the property of Archibald Gaines took precedent over the charge of infanticide. The outcome would have a profound effect not only on state's rights but would spark a tiny flame leading up to the American Civil War. And even after the trial was concluded, the media, poets such as Elizabeth Barret Browning, and other authors used the events to add fuel to the ever-growing debate on slavery.

But, it still remains a little-known trial, falling into the dust of history in part due to public "whitening" of the events and to the events of the Dred Scott decision almost a year later. Yet author Toni Morrison helped to revive interest in this trial by modeling one of the characters in her novel "Beloved" after the ghost of Margaret's slain daughter, Mary.

The book sometimes reads more like a college text and asks many questions that are never answered. But the amount of information surrounding the trial and concerning the battle of state's rights versus federal law make this a great book to read.