In the book Beloved by Toni Morrison, the horrific system of having people as property is the basis of a story that describes some of the rights African Americans were deprived from in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this book Sethe which is the main character is a slave who tries to look out for her offspring by killing her, similar to the poem The Slave Mother: A Tale of Ohio. This poem mentions "I will save my precious children From their darkly threatened doom, I will hew their path to freedom Through the portals of the tomb." which is exactly what Sethe did. She believed that by killing her daughter she would be freed of the worry she would have had if her daughter were alive and taken from her. Little did she know she would be left with the guilt and the forever remembrance of the once slavery and how now that she was free her daughter was still dead because of what she thought she was saving her from.
Like this case there were many, in which "Then, said the mournful mother, If Ohio cannot save, I will do a deed for freedom, She shall find each child a grave." Slave mothers like Sethe possessed a greater fear than to loose their child. Sethe was willing to give anything even a pure non homicidal conscious. Which is the same as what Julie Baird discovered in her research over the role of most mothers in slavery. "What I discovered was that, for at least some of the mothers, none of whom had any legal rights or power, killing their babies was actually the only way they knew to protect them." This idea gives the mothers a sense of right to what they did until after the deaths of their child.
 “The mother of the dead child acknowledges that she had killed it, and that her determination was to have killed all the children, and then destroy herself, rather than return to slavery" in the article from Cincinnati Gazette it is proven to a point that the mothers would also try to protect themselves when they had the chance. Sethe deserves no judgement, she wasn't the only one, and ended up judging herself in her act.




http://civilwarlibrarian.blogspot.com/2010/04/blade-was-at-my-own-breast-runaway.html
http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/everyday_writer/studentwriting/pdf/BairdHistoryEssay.pdf