off of the main tolls roads lest they be discovered by toll guards. Instead, they likely would have taken farm roads and open fields to avoid the guards, who would have sounded the alarm. We can only speculate about what delayed them, but a couple of old horses pulling an entire family of eight through snow would have been a hard tow. The long journey pushed the horses to their limits—the animals barely finishing the task of towing the weight of eight people the sixteen miles to the riverbank in frigid temperatures. The Garners abandoned the horses and sleigh at Washington House, a Covington hotel, and walked the last few hundred feet to the edge of the frozen Ohio River close to the Walnut Street Ferry. There, they faced another obstacle: crossing the half-mile-wide river undetected. Police watchmen were supposed to keep close watch of the river to ensure that fugitive slaves did not cross. Young Simon had lived in northern Kentucky, so he would have been familiar with the location of the watchmen’s posts.
After getting past night watchmen, the Garners’ next obstacle was moving across the ice, an unnatural walking surface, especially in the dark. Each of the adults would have carried a child across the river, since all but one was too small to navigate the ice without slipping and falling: Tommy, the oldest child, may have walked on his own. Each step the Garners took would have collectively put thousands of pounds of pressure onto the icy surface. Any misstep on a fragile section of the ice could have cracked it, sending some or all of the Garners to an icy death. The drama of an enslaved mother crossing the frozen Ohio River with her child in her arms was not a new one. The character Eliza in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is based on the real woman, Eliza Harris, who also escaped slavery and ran across the frozen river years before Peggy Garner.19 In fact, we will probably never know how many other enslaved mothers made the same perilous decision to cross the icy river on foot.
As they crossed the frozen Ohio River, the Garners shed their slave status and put on the mantle of freedom. The younger couple decided to assume new names, which served the triple functions of hiding their real identities, distancing themselves from their enslaved pasts, and claiming new destinies on free soil. And apparently, it was fairly common for fugitive slaves to choose new names in freedom. Peggy assumed her formal name Margaret (Peggy is the common nickname for Margaret); like his wife, Simon Jr. may have adopted a formal birth name or even a middle name when he chose to be called Robert. The couple’s four children and young Simon’s parents retained their names. Peggy and Simon Jr. would walk into the annals of history bearing their freedom names of Margaret and Robert.20
The Garners made it to the Cincinnati riverbank after sunrise on 28 January—hours later than they had hoped. Unfortunately, sunrise increased the risks of someone seeing them. Still, they pressed onward. Robert led his family to a house at Sixth and Mill Streets in the western part of the city, four houses from the Mill Creek Bridge. Their journey finally ended at around 8:00 a.m., some grueling ten hours after it had begun, at the home of Margaret’s cousin, Elijah Kite, and his wife, Mary.21
When they arrived, the Garners were tired, hungry, and cold. Kite welcomed his cousin and her family and introduced them to his wife, who began preparing their breakfast. The family decided it best to move to a more secure location immediately after breakfast. To that end, Kite hastily left to consult with Levi Coffin, a Quaker Underground Railroad operative, about how to move the large family to a safer location. As a white man, Coffin not only had more experience with large parties of fugitive slaves but also enjoyed civil rights that would safeguard against anyone barging into his home, searching it without a warrant, or seizing any occupants. As an African American, Kite did not enjoy these rights. Besides that, by harboring his cousin and her family, he risked a $1,000 fine and a six-month imprisonment under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. In a city like Cincinnati, which had a long history of antiabolitionist violence, Kite also risked being targeted by a mob. Coffin advised him to move the family further up Mill Creek to a black settlement that routinely harbored fugitives.22 After leaving Coffin’s house, Kite hurried back to his own home intending to follow his advice. Unfortunately, shortly after he returned home, he got some unexpected visitors.
Archibald K. Gaines, the owner of Margaret and the children, had discovered the family was missing only a few hours after they left Richwood and had gone after them with dogged determination. Before getting on the road to Cincinnati, he had gone over to the Marshall farm to see if the rest of the Garner family had escaped. There, the slave-owning neighbors learned that the entire family indeed had left, taking a sleigh and two horses with them. Marshall, who was too ill to travel, sent his son Thomas to retrieve his slaves.
Gaines and young Marshall quickly closed the distance between themselves and the fugitive family. It was not hard to follow the clues the Garners had left along the way, including the sleigh and horses left abandoned in Covington. Gaines and Marshall knew that the Garners’ kin, Joseph and Sarah Kite, resided somewhere in Cincinnati. Moreover, Thomas Marshall would have remembered that Robert had gone to visit them late the previous year. After some inquiries, someone directed the pursuers to Elijah Kite’s street. There, a girl pointed out the home and informed them that the party had gone inside.23
Once they knew the family’s location, the slaveholders left someone to watch the home while they went to secure a warrant under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act from John L. Pendery, the United States Commissioner for the Southern District of Ohio. The provisions of that law granted slaveholders authority to retrieve runaways in free states. It also provided for the appointment of federal commissioners, or officers, in local communities throughout the nation who were charged with enforcing the law. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outlined a clear process for owners to reclaim fugitive slaves: Upon discovering the whereabouts of their slave, owners had to go before a commissioner who could issue a warrant for the alleged fugitive’s arrest. The federal commissioner would then deputize citizens, bystanders, and posses to help execute the warrants. The law stated that “all good citizens [were] hereby commanded to assist in the prompt and efficient execution of this law.”24 Once in custody, the accused runaway would be brought back to the commissioner for a hearing. The burden of proof for the owner was very low: the only requirement for a person to establish ownership was a witness or affidavit from someone in the home state attesting to the fugitive’s identity. In this case, Gaines and Marshall would serve as each other’s witness. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act outlined harsh penalties for those who interfered with, or failed to enforce the law, with federal criminal charges, a fine up to $1,000, or civil lawsuits for the value of the slave. Moreover, the law provided commissioners with a decent incentive to rule in favor of the claimant: commissioners who remanded an African American to slavery were paid $10 and those who ruled in favor of the alleged fugitive received only $5. In current terms, that is equivalent to $247 versus $123. Some interpreted the unequal rewards as an attempt to bribe commissioners. Abolitionists and African Americans believed the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to be wholly corrupt and designed to benefit slaveholders.25 That was the grim reality of what the Garners would face should they be recaptured. In sum, they did not stand a chance under this legislation.
After Gaines and Marshall appeared before Commissioner Pendery the morning of 28 January, he promptly issued warrants for the Garners, giving them to John Ellis, the federal marshal, to execute. Pursuant to the provisions of the legislation, Ellis deputized a posse of white men from Cincinnati and northern Kentucky to help execute the warrants. Then the newly deputized marshals, Gaines, and Marshall quickly returned to the Kite home by 10:00 a.m. with warrants in hand, to recover the family. Elijah Kite barely had beaten them back to his home. Apparently, Robert Garner was none too happy that Elijah had not made arrangements to get the family out of the city ahead of time as they had planned. That fact, plus Elijah’s delay at Coffin’s house the morning of their arrival, and his return to the home only moments before the marshals arrived led Robert to suspect that he had betrayed the family. It remained a sore spot for Robert until his death.26 In reality, though, there is no evidence that Elijah had betrayed his cousin and her family to their owners; he may simply have been an ineffective Underground Railroad operative. His missteps, though, canceled the family’s herculean efforts to escape slavery.
The Garners were finishing breakfast when the marshals
