American Slavery Figure. Margaret Garner, a mulatto woman, was the primary subject in Pulitzer Prize recipient author Toni Morrison's 1987 book, "Beloved". Born Margaret Kite Gaines, as a slave in 1833 at United States Congressman John Pollard Gaines' Maplewood Plantation in Pre-Civil War America, her mother was a slave and her father was a Caucasian. After historians analyzed the documentation, it is reasonable to suspect that her father was Gaines as he was the only Caucasian male for miles. When Gaines was appointed Governor of the Oregon Territory, he sold Maplewood Plantation and his slaves in December of 1849 to his younger brother, Archibald Gaines. Her first child, Thomas, was conceived in the summer of 1849 and born the spring of 1850. Although she married another slave in 1849, Robert Garner, she gave birth to four fair-skinned mulatto children from forced sexual relationships with a Caucasian man. In January of 1856 she and seventeen other slaves attempted to escape to the North in an attempt to gain their freedom. Although some of the slaves did manage to reach Canada, she and her family were forcefully returned to the Deep South by Archibald Gaines and U.S. Marshalls. While on the journey south, to prevent her children from having her same fate of slavery, she attempted to stab to death her four children with a butcher's knife, killing her two-year-old daughter, Mary. She believed that her children would be "better off dead than forced to live as slaves." At that point, she attempted suicide before being subdued. She was taken to court for the murder of her daughter, yet her trial became the longest trial involving the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act when her lawyer, John Jolliffe, challenged the law. Jolliffe later authored the novel "Chattanooga," which was modeled after Garner's case. She wanted her trial for murder to be in Ohio as a free person, but it was held in Kentucky as a fugitive slave. The press covered her trial telling the general public of the atrocities of slavery and its existence as a cruel institution. As a slave or Gaines' property, she was not imprisoned but returned to her owner as that was the law. While traveling South on a steamboat, her nine-month-old daughter, Priscilla, was one of the victims, dying from drowning, when two steamboats accidently collided. Some sources states that she murdered this child but that was never proven. After this incident, she and her husband were separated for a time before being sent to New Orleans, Louisiana to be hired as house servants. This relocation was in an attempt by Gaines to hide her in the Deep South from the Federal authorities. After Governor Gaines died in Oregon of thyroid fever in 1857, she was sold by yet another brother, Abner Gaines, to Judge Dewitt Clinton Bonham to be a laborer on his 600-acre Willow Grove Plantation in Issaquena County, Mississippi, but died the next year of thyroid fever. Her widower, Robert Gaines, served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and in 1880 was living with his two sons. Besides "Beloved," she was the subject of the 1867 painting by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, called "The Modern Medea." The painting was published in the magazine "Harper's Weekly" in the May 18, 1867 edition with her saga.