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Margaret Garner (called Peggy) was an enslaved African-American woman in pre-Civil War America who was notorious – or celebrated – for killing her own daughter rather than allowing the child to be returned to slavery. She and her family had escaped in January 1856 across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, but they were apprehended by U. S. Marshals acting under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Margaret Garner's defense attorney moved to have her tried for murder in Ohio, to be able to get a trial in a free state and to challenge the Fugitive Slave Law as well. Her story was the inspiration for the novel ''Beloved'' (1987) by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, which was adapted into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey, as well as for her libretto for the early 21st-century opera ''Margaret Garner'' (2005), composed by Richard Danielpour. ==Early life== Garner, described as a mulatto, was born to Maplewood plantation, Boone Country, Kentucky, a house slave to the Gaines family who lived on a farm called Maplewood in Boone County, Kentucky. She may have been the daughter of the plantation owner John Pollard Gaines himself.〔(Steven Weisenburger, "A Historical Margaret Garner" ), Michigan Opera Theatre, accessed 20 Apr 2009〕 Margaret married one of her fellow slaves, Robert Garner, in 1849. That December, the plantation was sold along with all the slaves to John P. Gaines' younger brother, Archibald K. Gaines. The Garners' first child, Thomas, was born early in 1850.〔 Three of Margaret's later children (Samuel, Mary, and Priscilla) were described as mulattoes; each was born five to seven months after a child born to Archibald K. Gaines and his wife. These light-skinned children were likely the children of A.K. Gaines, the only adult white male at Maplewood. The timing suggests they were each conceived after his wife had become pregnant and was unavailable to him.〔(Steven Weisenburger, "A Historical Margaret Garner" ), Michigan Opera Theatre, accessed 20 Apr 2009. "Bertram Wyatt-Brown reminds us, Southern men commonly referred to their pregnant wives' last trimester or so when they were sexually unavailable as "the gander months" because it was supposedly natural, and to some extent informally countenanced, for them to seek intimate "comfort" with unmarried women or with enslaved women, if they owned any."〕 In a contemporary account, abolitionist Levi Coffin described Margaret Garner at her arrest as "a mulatto, about five feet high ... she appeared to be about twenty-one or twenty-three years old." She also had an old scar on the left side of her forehead and cheek, which she said had been caused when a "White man struck me." Her two boys were about four and six years old, Mary, two and a half, and Priscilla, an infant. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Margaret Garner」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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