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Levi Coffin Describes Margaret Garner's Attempt To Escape Slavery Analysis

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“Levi Coffin Describes Margaret Garner’s Attempt to Escape Slavery” is a story about a slave named Margaret Garner, who attempted to escape slavery in the winter of 1856. The story took place in Boone County, Kentucky – a slave state and Cincinnati, Ohio - where slavery is illegal. The author, Levi Coffin, a prosperous Quaker and abolitionist, who was an active leader in the Underground Railroad network that helped thousands of fugitive slaves escape to freedom. He was a religious man and an opponent of African American slavery and felt it was his duty to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, no matter the color of the person. Several years after slavery was abolished in America, Coffin was encouraged by many of his friends to write his memoir of how Margaret Garner was driven to kill her child and attempt to kill her other three children and herself. It is the heartbreaking honesty in this act of brutality which displays what the lives of slaves were like; This shows how far an enslaved mother will go to protect her children from the pain they would endure if taken back to slavery.
Levi Coffin felt it was important to be the voice for Margaret Garner to tell the untold story of the pain and suffering she endured as an enslaved woman. He wanted white people to see what it was like for African American women to be sold away from their children and husbands and forced to do the unthinkable to survive. This story gives an inside look at how slavery was a true crime and how it destroyed the souls of good people and their families. Coffin only knew Margaret for a short time, but he understood the pain she was in from her actions on that cold wintery night in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Margaret, her family and several other slave families belonging to different masters in Boone County, Kentucky fled the plantations of Northern Kentucky to travel to Ohio where slavery was illegal. The Garner family planned to end their enslavement by reaching Cincinnati, Ohio and connecting with the Underground Railroad. Due to the close-proximity to Cincinnati, one would assume their travels to be an easy undertaking, but the Ohio River – usually a barrier - was frozen solid and provided a bridge into Ohio. Once they made it across

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