Margaret Garner

I'm sure many were wondering what the end result ended up being in the Margaret Garner case. I researched and found that Margaret and her husband were taken into custody and tried in what became one of the longest fugitive slave trials in history. "During the two week trial, abolitionist and lawyer, John Jolliffe, argued that Margaret’s trips to free territory in Cincinnati entitled her and her children to freedom. Although Jolliffe provided compelling arguments, the judge denied the Garners’ plea for freedom and returned them to Gaines. In a bid to gain freedom for Margaret and her children, Jolliffe convinced officials to arrest Margaret on the charge of murdering her daughter.  Joliffe surmised that with a murder trail, Margaret would have another chance for freedom. Gaines caught on to Jolliffe’s plan and relocated the Garners to several different plantations before finally selling them to his brother in Arkansas. As a result, federal marshals were not able to serve Margaret with an arrest warrant and she never received a second trial. Margaret Garner died in 1858 from a typhoid epidemic."  
Steven Weisenburger, Modern Madea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998; Weisenburger, Steven, “A Historical Margaret Garner,” http://www.motopera.org/mg_ed/educational/HS_HistoricalMGarner.html (accessed November 25, 2007).

Margaret's willingness to go to jail rather than to return back to her owners shows us again how desperate she was to escape the horrors of slavery. In the novel Morrison made plain to us the many absurdities that took place during slavery. Because of this we can empathize with Sethe and try not to judge her actions. She did what she felt was best for her and her children She did not want them to undergo the torture that she witnessed and experienced, and attempted to provide a better alternative; which was death.