I choose to do my report on Margaret Graner because she seemed like a brave woman. She made a brave and dangerous escape to freedom with her family. Margaret wanted what was best for her children, even if that meant killing them. All she ever wanted for her children was for them to never suffer the life of a slave.
Margaret was an African-American in pre-Civil War, born into the life of slavery in Boone County, Kentucky on the Plantation of John Pollard Gaines on June fourth 1833. She has a scar on her forehead and cheek that she says she got from a white male. Her parents were also slaves, and when she got older she became a household domestic. “She married Robert Garner in 1849. Robert was also a slave on the plantation.” (http://www.facts-about.org.uk)
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It was suppose to last a day or less, buy they didn’t know if it should be a murder case or not. When on trial Margret didn’t get freedom and the judge told her she had to go back to the Grains. Then Margaret’s lawyer, Jolliffe got the officials to charge Margaret for murdering her daughter.
Officials were gonna go and arrest her, they couldn’t find her. A.K. Gains had moved their family between cities, then put them on a boat to a plantation in Arkansas. When there were on the boat it crashed into another. Margaret was holding her baby girl when it happened, they were both thrown overboard. The cook of the ship jumped into the water to try and save them but could only save Margaret. Her baby drowned, Margaret also tried to drown herself. She was happy that her child never had to suffer as a slave.
Margaret and Robert Worked in New Orleans then was sold to judge Clinton Bonham for plantation labor at Tennessee Landing, Mississippi. Margaret's husband was interviewed after her death, he said she never tried to harm her children again, but always said “better for them to be Put out of the world than live in slavery”. (http://www.facts-about.org.uk) She died in Mississippi in 1858 due to typhoid fever her husband told the interviewer. Typhoid fever is caused by salmonella typhi bacteria, it spreads through contaminated food and water. Before she had died she told her husband, “never marry again in slavery, but to live in hope of