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  • Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohioby Nikki M. Taylor
  • Hilary Green
Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. By Nikki M. Taylor. New Approaches to Midwestern Studies. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 163. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8214-2160-4; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8214-2159-8.)

Margaret Garner intrigued her contemporaries, has captivated scholars, and even inspired Toni Morrison's novel Beloved(1987). Yet Nikki M. Taylor raises new insights into the Garner case, enslaved women's experiences, and how society grappled with her infamous actions. In Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio, Taylor contends that enslaved women endured visible and invisible bodily injuries "quietly and internally, but at times, their response erupted violently, outwardly and even publicly, in ways that defy comprehension or prevent our sympathy" (p. 2).

Taylor opens with the details on the Garners' flight across the Ohio River from Kentucky and their recapture at the Kite residence in Cincinnati, Ohio. Once capture seemed imminent, Margaret Garner killed her daughter and attempted to kill her surviving children, to the horror of the Garner men and the other individuals engaged in the recapture. After establishing the facts, Taylor examines slavery and the Kentucky farms where the Garners labored to understand the world that contributed to Margaret Garner's fateful decision. Detailed discussions of the Gaines and Marshall families allow Taylor to persuasively depict the Garners as the embodiment of the trauma and the destruction of marriage and families under slavery. By running away, Margaret Garner enacted her notion of motherhood, which centered on "the right to choose slavery or freedom, or life or death for [her children]" (p. 41).

Cincinnati served as the milieu of the Garners' aspirations for freedom. Cincinnati boasted an interracial, well-resourced minority dedicated to fighting [End Page 742]slavery amid a larger community committed to an economy sustained by southern business interests and goods produced by slavery. In the pivotal third chapter, Taylor deftly shows how Garner testified to her trauma and notion of motherhood in several ways. Her visible and invisible bodily scars implicated the role of her owner and the Maplewood farm in the resulting murder and attempted murder of her children. Her courtroom demeanor revealed her humanity, respectability, and grief over her lost child and her sadness for her surviving children. Her conversations with two ministers and a women's rights advocate revealed the options she had previously tried and her lack of remorse for securing freedom for her children through death. Despite voicing this trauma, the testimony did not prevent the Garners' return under the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and later family separation in New Orleans. Yet Margaret Garner could still find "'frantic joy'" after a steamship collision resulted in her surviving daughter's death and her owner's public loss of honor for lying about the New Orleans trip (p. 87).

Over the next three chapters, Taylor explores the claims of Margaret Garner's sexual abuse, the parentage of her daughters, and whether she was truly driven toward madness, as contemporaries claimed. While lacking conclusive evidence of sexual abuse, Taylor persuasively shows that Archibald K. Gaines possibly fathered one or more of Garner's children through a careful analysis of Gaines's own directives of not harming the children at the capture and how his preoccupation with burial preparations caused his absence at the departure of Garner's return transport. Since Garner's attacks on her sons differed from those on her daughters, Taylor speculates as to whether Garner was responding to their possible paternity, her ideal notion of motherhood, or other factors. Despite contemporary diagnoses, Garner felt that she committed a rational act in securing freedom for her daughters. Viewed as a madwoman, a martyr, and a superwoman by nineteenth-century society, Garner, Taylor concludes, acting on her own, voiced "a damning indictment of her slave experience and of her owner, in particular" (p. 125).

This concise, well-researched work is a wonderful addition, deepening the literature on the Garner case. It will...

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