The Case of Margaret Garner

The Slave Mother of Margaret Taken Down South Again.- Our readers will recollect our statement in Friday’s Gazette, that Sheriff Brashears, the Sheriff of this County, having learned that Margaret, the slave mother, had been brought back and lodged in Covington jail, sent two deputies over, on Thursday last, to arrest her on Gov. Chase’s requisition, and that she had been removed, by Mr. Gaines’s orders, the night before. No one knew where she had been taken to, though various reports were in circulation in Covington about it. Mr. Gaines’s friends said that he had only removed her to his farm to save the expense of keeping her in jail- others said she had been shipped down South.

On Friday our Sheriff received information which induced him to believe that she had been sent on the railroad to Lexington, thence via Frankfort to Louisville, there to be shipped off to the New Orleans slave market.

He immediately telegraphed to the Sheriff at Louisville (who holds the original warrant from Gov. Morehead, granted on the requisition of Gov. Chase,) to arrest her there, and had a deputy in readiness to go down for her. But he has received no reply to his dispatch. As she was taken out on Wednesday night, there is reason to apprehend that she has already passed Louisville, and is now on her way to New Orleans.

Why Mr. Gaines brought Margaret at all, we cannot comprehend. If it was to vindicate his character, he was most unfortunate in the means he selected, for his duplicity has now placed this in a worse light than ever before, and kept before the public the miserable spectacle of his dishonor.

Perhaps he is only a weak man, who felt that impulse to do right, but had not strength to resist the temptation to sell- for the price of a negro woman- his honor and his good name, beside bringing disgrace upon his State.

We have learned now, by experience, what is that honsted [illegible] comity of Kentucky on which Judge Leavitt so earnestly and sincerely advised Ohio to rely.