Margaret Garner - Early Life

Early Life

Garner, described as a mulatto, was born to Priscilla on a farm called Maplewood in Boone County, Kentucky. She may have been the daughter of the plantation owner John Pollard Gaines. Priscilla was his house servant.

Margaret married one of her fellow slaves, a man named Robert Garner, in 1849. In December of the same year, the plantation was sold, along with all the slaves, to John P. Gaines's younger brother, Archibald K. Gaines. The Garner's first child, a boy named Thomas, was born early in 1850.

Three of Margaret's later children (Samuel, Mary, and Priscilla) were described as mulattos; 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.

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.