Then, said the mournful mother,

If Ohio cannot save,

I will do a deed for freedom,

Shalt find each child a grave.

I will save my precious children

From their darkly threatened doom,

I will hew their path to freedom

Through the portals of the tomb.

—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1857¹

Thousands of enslaved people attempted to escape slavery every year in the antebellum era (roughly the years from 1830 to 1860), but only a small fraction succeeded. Coming up with a plan of escape, including the means and route of escape, was incredibly challenging for enslaved people. Even a solid escape plan often was not enough to guarantee success; would-be fugitives had to summon a high degree of courage to face the prospect of permanently leaving behind their farms, families, and communities in pursuit of an uncertain freedom in an unknown region. Only the most ingenious, resourceful, determined, courageous, and fortunate fugitives made it to freedom.

Despite how courageous, empowered, resourceful, and determined the Garners were, and how intensely they desired freedom, the sheer size of their party proved to be a hindrance. Larger groups, with few exceptions, rarely made it to freedom. The larger the group, the greater the risks of discovery and capture.² Most potential runaways knew the risks and would not dare attempt to escape with their entire family in tow. The Garners were an exception.

Not only were entire family units unlikely to escape slavery, but even as individuals the Garners were the unlikeliest of runaways. Most runaways tended to be young men in their teens and twenties, traveling alone. None of the Garners fit that profile except Simon Jr. In their mid-fifties, young Simon’s parents were the antithesis of that youthful profile. Peggy was well into her fifth pregnancy and certainly could not have made the journey without the assistance of her family. As women and mothers, Peggy and Mary were far from typical runaways, as well, because enslaved women did not commonly try to escape slavery. It is not that these women did not want to escape, but because they were the primary caregivers for their children, the thought of leaving them behind was unimaginable; the thought of taking the children with them was equally overwhelming. In other words, children decreased the likelihood that their mothers would escape. Interestingly enough, although women did not escape bondage as often as men, most of those who did were driven out of a fear of losing their children through sale, and those took the children with them.³

Gender ideals and obligations to family and community kept enslaved women tied to their farms and plantations. Ideals about black womanhood pressured women not to leave their children behind if they did flee: the culture dictated that mothers should be selfless and sacrificing. Good mothers, then, did not abandon their children, just as good wives did not abandon their husbands, on a quest for personal freedom. Additionally, enslaved women had fewer realistic opportunities to escape because of their relatively limited mobility. Nineteenth-century gender conventions limited the movements of enslaved African American women and confined them where they lived and worked. They were subjected to what the historian Stephanie Camp termed a “geography of containment.” The only exceptions were those women who traveled with their owner’s family as personal servants or nurses. By comparison, enslaved men possessed far more mobility than enslaved women: they transported products to the market, did errands, carried messages for their owners, worked in cities, and sometimes worked jobs for pay. Moreover, they were more likely to be given passes to visit family members. Enslaved women’s geography of containment was certainly true for the Garner women. Peggy claimed she had been to Cincinnati only once—as a small girl—underscoring how little mobility she had had in her entire life. Mary Garner had been hired out once about five years before the escape; she then spent a year hired out to a man named Cas Warrington, of Covington, Kentucky—a small town just across the river from Cincinnati. During her service to Warrington, Mary enjoyed mobility for the first time in her life. He often sent her to Cincinnati on errands and allowed her to travel there by herself to attend church services. But it had been years since she had enjoyed that mobility. By contrast, young Simon had been hired out several times and had frequently traversed Boone County, northern Kentucky, and Cincinnati, so he was quite familiar with the regional geography. He knew the location of the toll roads—manned by guards ready to sound an alarm about runaways—and how to avoid them. Simon Jr. knew just where farmland met streams or steep hills and where the bends in the road could obscure travelers. These gendered differences of mobility mattered because regional geographical familiarity—especially in the dark—proved essential to successfully navigate the family to freedom.⁴

Women were unlikely runaways for another reason: they rarely had the opportunity to disappear or absent themselves from work for any period of time without being missed immediately. On farms, the distinction of the work duties between those who worked in the house and those who worked in the fields was not as sharp as it was on large plantations. Enslaved women on farms did farmwork and housework. In addition to tending to crops and animals, these women cooked, cleaned, sewed, and nursed—or babysat—children for their owners. They worked virtually around the clock, meeting all sorts of demands and needs of members of the slave-owning family and their guests. And these women could hope for little reprieve from the on-call, around-the-clock work regimen, because their work and home spaces often were practically the same sites. Many owners of small farms could not afford to have separate structures for their enslaved workers, so they often lived in the main family structures, in the kitchens or other auxiliary rooms.⁵ Hence, living in such close quarters to whites, these women would be quickly missed if they escaped.

Most slaves who seriously contemplated running away understood that traveling with children posed huge challenges that exponentially decreased the odds of their success. The ages and number of children could make an already difficult journey even more conspicuous and trying. Infants, especially, had to be wrapped well to protect them from the extreme elements. The risks included frostbite, heat stroke, dehydration, exhaustion, and illness. Adults had to carry infants and small children whose legs could not handle the walking. Moreover, at any given point, infants and toddlers could, without warning, cry into the darkness, alerting sleeping owners or the slave patrol that someone was escaping. Understandably, few escaping with young babies or small children in tow were successful.⁶ Moreover, traveling with one child was difficult enough; more than two children made such journeys exercises in futility. Yet the Garners had four very young children, including an infant and a toddler. Given these odds, how did the Garners have the audacity to escape?

. . .

What were the probabilities of slaves securing freedom in Boone County, Kentucky—legitimately, or otherwise? Geography created the best biggest threat to the security of slavery in northern Kentucky. Boone County was close enough to Ohio, a free state, that slave owners faced the likely possibility of their slaves escaping at any point. Besides that, there were cross-state relationships that further increased the likelihood of escape. Many enslaved people in Boone County had free relatives living in Cincinnati who could facilitate their escape or hide them. Slaveholders with only a handful of slaves could not afford to lose any to escape, making them more controlling and watchful over the movements of their bondspeople. Consequently, enslaved people in that area found that freedom was hard to come by—either through escape or manumission. In 1850, twelve Boone County slaves managed to escape slavery and another eight were manumitted—six of whom were freed by the same person.⁹ Taken together, only twenty African Americans—1 percent—obtained their freedom in that county that year. That is just a small snapshot of the dim dream of freedom in Boone County despite its proximity to a free state.

The Garners were undeterred by the odds. They had a clear vision of freedom and a mental roadmap of how to get there. Freedom was not an abstraction for them: a few of the Garner adults had been to Cincinnati and witnessed how free and freed African Americans lived. For example, Mary Garner said that when she was hired out in northern Kentucky, she had sometimes attended the Cincinnati AME church. Her experience in an independent black church—and an AME one at that—introduced her to a vibrant free black community that practiced a liberatory version of Christianity. Although she had been a Christian for two decades, there were no black churches in Richwood or Boone County, where they lived as slaves. Those experiences in the Cincinnati church undoubtedly affected her spirituality, view of bondage, and desire for freedom.¹⁰ Nor was freedom an ideal or remote fantasy for the Garners. Freedom was not a distant place outside of their grasp or awareness; freedom was sixteen miles away, and they knew the route.

A successful escape required careful planning, coordinated efforts, resources, advance knowledge of the geography and terrain, and the assistance of free blacks. The Garner escape was not impulsive; it was the result of at least a month of careful planning and coordination. Young Simon was the engine behind the entire scheme. Although they all collectively decided that they would escape, he made all the plans and supplied every resource they needed, including geographical knowledge, transportation, a pistol for protection, and a safe house.

The escape plan hinged on making contact with black Cincinnati because the family needed people to assist them on the other side of the Ohio River. This support was critical: fugitive slaves with friends and kin in free states who were willing to provide assistance had better chances of success. In December 1855, Simon Jr. had accompanied Thomas W. Marshall, the nineteen-year-old son of his owner, to Cincinnati to drive hogs in for slaughter and sale, as he had done so many times before. The men had grown up at the same time and may have played together as children. Of the relationship, Thomas Marshall said that he had always treated young Simon as more of a companion than a slave. But by the time they were adults, few would have defined them as friends—largely because the racial and status boundaries between them had hardened, creating an unbridgeable gulf. For Simon Jr. this trip’s significance had nothing to do with work or male bonding; indeed, the trip proved to be a crucial factor in finalizing the Garners’ plans to escape. During that December trip, Thomas made the critical mistake of giving Simon Jr. some freedom to visit his wife’s relatives, Sarah and Joseph Kite. The Kites’ son, Elijah, was Peggy’s first cousin. Peggy, young Simon, and Elijah had spent some portion of their childhoods together in the same Richwood neighborhood before Elijah escaped in 1850.¹¹

After taking leave of his young owner, Simon Jr. had inquired of several African Americans on the street where to find Joseph and Sarah Kite’s home. Most African Americans living in Cincinnati then knew who Joseph Kite was and where he lived. A man named Edward John Wilson directed young Simon to the Kite home on Sixth Street, east of Broadway, near the Bethel AME Church.¹²

Joseph Kite had been born into bondage on March 16, 1787, in Culpeper Court House, Virginia, where he spent the first sixteen years of his life. By the time he was thirty years old, his owner relocated to east Tennessee. Joseph eventually ended up in Boone County, Kentucky—likely owned by George Kite of Burlington, who had an enslaved workforce of seven. In Boone County, Joseph had met his wife, Sarah, who was nearly twenty years his junior. They had at least one child together, Elijah. Joseph hired his own time and earned enough money to eventually purchase his freedom in 1825. He immediately moved to Cincinnati, joining a heavy stream of African Americans who shed their slave status, legally or otherwise, and settled in Cincinnati, “Queen City of the West,” in the 1820s. Joseph Kite bore the distinction of being among only a small number of African Americans who lived in the city before the great exodus of 1829, when impending mob violence precipitated the historic exodus of half of the black population. Here, at least, jobs abounded to nearly the same extent as the racism and legal proscriptions black settlers faced. Joseph Kite worked as a peddler for many years.¹³ Although not considered entirely respectable work, the entrepreneurial nature of peddling worked in his favor; he soon had saved enough to purchase his wife and contracted with Wilson Harper, his son Elijah’s owner, to purchase him for $450. Elijah escaped in 1850 with his wife and their five-year-old child before the transaction was complete, though. Now a fugitive slave, Elijah settled in central Ohio for a few years and then moved to Cincinnati to be nearer to his parents. When Harper learned of Elijah’s whereabouts, he chose not to retrieve him under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but decided, instead, to take a gamble and sue Joseph Kite for breach of contract regarding the broken purchase agreement. Joseph Kite hired abolitionist attorney John Jolliffe to defend him, who persuasively argued that the contract was nullified because it had been drawn up in Ohio, where laws prohibited any buying and selling of slaves.¹⁴

A thirty-year resident of one of the most racist cities in antebellum America, Joseph Kite had witnessed more than his fair share of mobs and near mobs. However, he also had witnessed much good in Cincinnati, including the establishment of several of the city’s first black churches and schools, as well as the growth and stabilization of the black community. He was a pillar of that community. Kite had lived in the city long enough to see the Underground Railroad grow from a few committed free blacks who risked life and limb, to a strong interracial network stretching across several Ohio counties. Joseph and his son, Elijah, knew the inner workings of the Cincinnati Underground Railroad and who the main conductors were. Even if they were not operatives in that movement, they became de facto activists when their own kin made the decision to seek their assistance. Simon Jr. reasoned that the location of the elder Kites’ home—in a very populated section of town in the heart of the black community—was too conspicuous. Besides that, everyone knew Joseph. Elijah, however, lived in a less dense part of town in the western section of the city. Simon Jr. weighed the likelihood of capture at both homes and decided he would take his family to Elijah Kite’s residence once they crossed the Ohio River.

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