cuts on his throat—one four inches long—and Sammy from gashes on his head—injuries inflicted by their mother. Cilla’s head was swollen and bruised. She bled from her nose as the officials removed her from the Kite home. Someone in the home tenderly wrapped little Mary in a quilt and put her on the bed in the next room. Though cut from ear to ear reportedly, the toddler did not die swiftly. According to witnesses, she gasped and struggled for air as a male neighbor carried her from the bed into the outside yard. She was dying as her parents, grandparents, and siblings were being apprehended, led outside, and loaded into an omnibus, a horse-drawn bus designed to transport groups of passengers in the mid-nineteenth century. As the omnibus carrying her entire family left the scene, little Mary Garner was in the arms of a stranger as she took her last breath.34 So ended the Garners’ quest for freedom. Sadly, their brief freedom in Cincinnati had been marked with violence, much like their bondage.
Still in front of the Kites’ home after the omnibus departed, Archibald K. Gaines took Mary’s body from the arms of the neighbor, intending to take it back to Covington for a proper burial in a slave cemetery. The crowd vociferously objected to his removing her body before a proper coroner’s inquest could be made into her death. Gaines complied and awaited the arrival of Hamilton County Coroner John Menzies, who had been summoned to the home. Coroner Menzies was himself from the same Richwood neighborhood as Gaines and knew the family quite well.35 He immediately examined the scene and the girl’s body, while Gaines patiently waited for him to finish—apparently more concerned about securing Mary’s body than securing his other slaves. When Menzies completed his examinations, he gave the toddler’s little body back to Gaines, who loaded it, and then proceeded to the Hammond Street jail. A neighbor claimed he held a funeral, but it is not clear where Gaines laid the toddler to rest.36
2
BEFORE THE BLOOD
I have but four, the treasures of my soul,
They lay like doves around my heart;
I tremble lest some cruel hand
Should tear my household wreaths apart.
My baby girl, with childish glance,
Looks curious in my anxious eye,
She little knows that for her sake
Deep shadows round my spirit lie.
My playful boys could I forget,
My home night seems a joyous spot,
But with their sunshine mirth I blend
The darkness of their future lot.
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 18571
Mary’s death at her own mother’s hands cannot be comprehended without going back to the source of the Garners’ trauma—the place from which they had run, two farms in Richwood in Boone County, Kentucky, and where the younger couple was known as Peggy and young Simon. Agriculture was the primary economic activity in the state. Kentucky led the South in the production of rye and barley and the raising of horses; it ranked second in the production of hemp, tobacco, corn, wheat, and raising of sheep, and third in hogs. The soil and climate in the Bluegrass State could not yield cotton, rice, or sugarcane; tobacco, though, was prevalent. On the eve of the Civil War, Kentucky produced 25 percent of the nation’s total tobacco crops. Throughout most of the early nineteenth century, the state was second only to Virginia in tobacco cultivation, and during the Civil War, Kentucky surpassed Virginia. In Kentucky, 65 percent of the tobacco was produced on small farms—not on plantations, such as the ones in Virginia.2 As important as tobacco was to Kentucky, the crop played second fiddle to subsistence crops such as corn, rye, and barley.
The small farmers who populated antebellum Kentucky never became as dependent on slave labor as whites in other southern states. Slaveholding simply never became widespread there. For example, in 1850, nearly 77 percent of the adult white males in the state did not own any slaves. Of those who did, their average number of holdings was the fourth smallest in the nation.3
Boone County, where the Garners were enslaved, is the northernmost county in Kentucky. In the antebellum era, its rolling hills and plush greenery distinguished its landscape. The county’s economy was built by farmers who sold Indian corn, butter, wheat, rye, hay, flax, and hogs. Most farmers sold a diversity of goods ranging from wheat to butter to slaughtered animals. The county ranked second in the state in orchard goods, fifth in wheat, and tenth in hogs. Raising hogs was popular and profitable in Boone County because of its proximity to Cincinnati, or “Porkopolis,” a major national pork-packing center. Roughly 40 percent of Boone County farmers who produced these goods depended on slave labor to do so.4 In 1850, the county boasted 11,185 residents, and more than 19 percent of them, or 2,100, were enslaved—a percentage that is slightly lower than the statewide average. Richwood, the town where the Garners lived, had a significantly higher density of enslaved people than the rest of the county and about double that of the entire state. About half the residents in that small town were enslaved. Without a doubt then, Richwood was a slaving community. Only 485 white households owned Boone County’s entire slave population, which averages about four per slaveholding family. Most of the slaveholders in the county were yeoman slaveholders, defined as those who owned fewer than nine slaves (There were a few extremes, though: one Boone County slaveholder owned twenty-five enslaved people.). Only thirty-seven free African Americans lived in the county, making Boone among the counties with the smallest ratio of free blacks in the upper South. The low number of free blacks suggests that it was rare for slaves to be freed or manumitted in that county; and those who were freed, left.5
Kentuckians then and now often boasted that slavery was “milder” or more “innocent” in the Bluegrass State than on cotton plantations in the deep South. They wrongly assume that slavery in Kentucky was physically less demanding and grueling, beatings and punishments less brutal, and the destruction of slave families less common. Kentuckians also wrongly assume that slave owners in their state were benevolent patriarchs who treated their bondspeople humanely. Gaines’s attorney would later remark that “the slavery of Kentucky is so mild in form that I infinitely prefer it to the poverty of the North.” He added, “The condition of slaves in the South is much better . . . than the half-starved free colored people of the North.” Whites living in Richwood in the 1850s claimed that the Garners were “well-housed,” “well-fed,” and looked “contented and happy.” They also insisted that the Garners had “always received great kindness” and “the comforts of a family.”6 When the Garners escaped and violently resisted returning to that “mild” slavery, they discredited such fantasies.
No, enslaved Kentuckians did not work in cotton fields in the searing sun from sunup to sundown; nor did they work on rice plantations in humid, malarial conditions, but those facts do not mean their enslavement was “mild.” Kentucky slavery had its own brand of hardship and horror. The smaller size of Kentucky farms was a disadvantage for enslaved African Americans, not a benefit. For one, the smaller the number of slaves a farmer owned, the greater the workload for them.
There is a direct relationship between the quantity of work obligations and the quality of life for enslaved people.7 Those living and working on small farms had to perform farm and household duties. Because of the various livestock and crops being raised and grown at the farm where Peggy lived, her range of chores may have included milking the cows, churning butter, herding sheep, cutting their wool, feeding the animals, collecting firewood, preparing the soil for seeding, planting, and harvesting the crops. In addition, she also may have been responsible for work inside the Gaineses’ home, including cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, sewing,
