Margaret Garner was the runaway slave who, when confronted with capture just outside of Cincinnati, slit the throat of her toddler daughter rather than have her face a life in slavery. Her story has inspired Toni Morrison's Beloved, a film based on the novel starring Oprah Winfrey, and an opera. Yet, her life has defied solid historical treatment. In Driven toward Madness, Nikki M. Taylor brilliantly captures her circumstances and her transformation from a murdering mother to an icon of tragedy and resistance. Taylor, the first African American woman to write a history of Garner, grounds her approach in black feminist theory. She melds history with trauma studies to account for the shortcomings in the written record. In so doing, she rejects distortions and fictionalized images; probes slavery's legacies of sexual and physical violence and psychic trauma in new ways; and finally fleshes out a figure who had been rendered an apparition. -- Provided by publisher.

A documentary account of the fugitive slave Margaret Garner who, when her family's sanctuary was surrounded by slave hunters in 1856, murdered one daughter and planned to kill her other children rather than see them returned to slavery. The case inspired "the longest, most spectacular fugitive-slave trial in history" and a number of literary interpretations, including Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Isaac Johnson escaped from slavery and joined the Union Army. Later "he wrote the story of his life as a slave to earn money to send his children to college."--Jacket.