Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio, by Nikki M. Taylor (review)

Nikki M. Taylor's Driven toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio is a rich and heart-wrenching telling of one of the most devastating cases in fugitive slave history. As one of the first books published in the New Approaches to Midwestern Studies series, Taylor's work draws from the personal papers, regional newspapers, and government records found within Ohio state archives. Driven toward Madness examines the life and legacy surrounding Margaret Garner and the seven members of the Garner family who dared to escape their bondage in Kentucky in the winter of 1856. Together, Robert, twenty-seven years old, and his pregnant wife, Margaret, twenty-two years old, along with their four children: Tommy, six; Sammy, four; Mary, two; and Cilla, nine months; and Robert's parents, Simon and Mary, both in their mid-fifties, stole their master's horse, sled, and themselves in order to reach the free state of Ohio, just twelve miles away and across the Ohio River. Remarkably, the family made it to relatives who could help them get further north. But before they could begin the next part of their dangerous journey, Archibald K. Gaines, owner of Margaret, Robert, and all of their four children, arrived at their front door with U.S. Marshals and the law on his side. The short-lived escape led Margaret to attempt the unthinkable. Faced with the likely prospect of being returned to slavery, she attempted to kill her four children rather than have them live their lives enslaved. She fatally slit her daughter Mary's throat before local authorities stopped her. The tragedy sent shockwaves across the country. Both southerners and northerners were appalled, leading all to wonder how a mother could kill her child.

According to Taylor, "slavery caused trauma" (2). Her assessment is obvious and yet under-explored. One might argue that past scholars and the public have placed more emphasis on Garner's actions than on the institution that led to them. What one might see as inhuman, Taylor sees as the "mirror reflection of the slave experience that inspired it" (117). Here Taylor is particularly interested in how the enslaved both experienced and coped with trauma. Her research builds off the brilliant work of late historian Stephanie M. H. Camp, whose Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004) offers a framework of examining the enslaved corporal through a lens of three separate bodies, which describes the body as a site of domination, of terror and pain, and of pleasure and enjoyment. Taylor offers readers a fourth body, which explores "resistance and violent eruption in response to trauma" (3).

Driven toward Madness provides the slave experience from the perspective of small farms in what might be considered "mild" slave states. In Kentucky, 77 percent of adult white males did not own slaves, and those who did had average slave holdings estimated as the fourth smallest in the nation. However, Taylor debunks the myth that a state such as Kentucky was mild. The proximity to and heavy dependence on small groups of enslaved people allowed miserable conditions and violence to be particularly acute. The Garners experienced physical assault; long periods of separation; and, likely, sexual abuse. Slaveholder Archibald K. Gaines provides us with the perfect example of how smalltime farmers socially, economically, and even politically engaged with their enslaved.

Taylor's work requires that we ask ourselves and students the hard questions: How do we examine both "interior and exterior" effects of trauma on the enslaved? How do we reclaim enslaved black women's voices and agency? What does the world look like for families who have no recourse in the face of physical and sexual abuse? How do the auction block and financial hardship serve as tools of...