Ready Reference Treatise: Beloved

“Beloved” by the Nobel Prize winning American writer Toni Morrison was first published in 1987.

The story is set during and after the Civil War in America, between 1861 and 1865. An African-American slave, Margaret Garner, is the source of inspiration for the story.

Margaret Garner had run away from slavery for a brief period during 1856. She had run away from Kentucky and gone to Ohio, a free state.

A group of temporary police force came there to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. According to that Act, the slave owners had the right to follow their runaway slaves across state borders.

Margaret Garner did not want her daughter to become a slave so she killed her two year old daughter.