Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South - Hardcover

Toni Morrison's Beloved was based on a real incident: an 1856 infanticide committed by 22-year-old Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who, when recapture was imminent, cut her daughter's throat with a butcher's knife. "The ensuing public opinion battle raged for months," writes Steven Weisenburger. For the abolitionist movement, "no case more incisively revealed the pathology of slavery, and no deeds better symbolized the slave's tragic heroism." But to those in favor of slavery, "her deeds demonstrated that slaves were subhuman. Only a beast would kill its offspring, they reasoned, so Margaret's child-murder proved the bondservant's need for Southern slavery's kindly paternal authority."

Weisenburger's account of Garner's life has a novelistic flair of its own, laying out the facts in crisp detail. He guides readers through the controversial month-long trial and its aftermath, with her return into bondage and, for a time, obscurity. Modern Medea provides a rich understanding of the realities of life in the antebellum South and the legal and cultural battles that took place over the institution of slavery.