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.
During his Christmas visit with Peggy’s relatives, young Simon had familiarized himself with the exact location of the home at Sixth and Mill Streets. He remained with the Kites for two days and even enjoyed a Christmas play before meeting up with Thomas Marshall to make the journey back to Richwood. That visit ensured him that they had a destination and capable support on the other side of the river and allowed him to finalize the family’s plans to flee.
Young Simon might have claimed his own freedom then, based on his stay in Ohio. State laws protected black freedom for those legally on its soil. According to the 1841 State v. Farr ruling, an enslaved person brought into Ohio willingly by his or her owner, even with the intention of simply passing through it, was considered free.15 He could have taken advantage of Thomas’s mistake of bringing him into the state and boldly claimed his freedom in a court of law and won. Joseph Kite’s abolitionist attorney, John Jolliffe, would have made certain of that. Moreover, had young Simon absconded then, he could have easily put himself into the capable hands of Underground Railroad agents—never to return to bondage or Boone County. Instead, he made the selfless, but ill-fated, decision not to pursue freedom without his family, so he returned to Kentucky with Thomas Marshall.16
The Garners waited nearly three weeks to escape after Simon Jr.’s return to Richwood. Perhaps they did not have an earlier opportunity. When the opportunity did present itself, the family coordinated the departure of Peggy and her children, Tommy, Sammy, Mary, and Cilla, who lived on the Gaines farm, named Maplewood, and Simon Jr. and his parents, Mary and Simon, who lived on James Marshall’s property. Timing was critical: they had to wait until all their owners had retired to bed on the night they planned to leave. They also had to be careful not to leave too early, lest they awaken the sleeping families with the slightest sound; yet they also had to leave enough time to travel the sixteen miles to Cincinnati, which was a day’s journey by foot under normal circumstances. The Garners knew there was no way they could have made the long journey by foot—especially with four small children and with Peggy being pregnant. Moreover, the sixteen miles between their farms in Boone County, Kentucky, and freedom in Cincinnati, Ohio, would seem like a thousand in freezing temperatures. So Simon Jr. found transportation for the family of eight: a sleigh and two old horses from the Marshall farm to pull it. He and his parents brought the horse-drawn sleigh over to Maplewood to collect Peggy and the children at 10:00 p.m. on 27 January 1856.17
The night of 27 January was exceptionally frigid—cold enough that the Ohio River was frozen. Conventional wisdom would lead one to question why the Garners left in the winter with its frigid temperatures and snowy, icy conditions; but the warmer months actually posed more obstacles to travel and risks of discovery. First, more people would have been outside in the evening in the warmer months, ensuring that someone would have seen the fugitive family along the way. Second, there would have been no way to convey a party that size and with such small children in warmer weather; they would have had to walk. The sleigh across snow made travel infinitely easier and faster than walking. Finally, in warmer months, the Ohio River, which separated the slave south from the free north, would have been a barrier to freedom, because they would have needed a boat or skiff to get across. It would have been exceedingly difficult to find someone willing to ferry them across because Kentucky laws forbade ferryman from carrying African Americans across the river without a permit from their owners.18 Moreover, the fugitives would have needed a boat big enough for eight—an unlikely prospect.
One advantage of having worked in such proximity to the river for all those years is that the Simon Jr. knew its particularities. For example, in the nineteenth century, those who knew anything about the Ohio River knew it frequently froze solid in January and February; and when it did, it became a natural bridge from the slave state of Kentucky to the free state of Ohio. This knowledge was invaluable to the fugitives and dictated when they escaped. In sum, it actually was wiser and easier to flee in the winter.
The journey took the family all night. The fugitives likely would have stayed 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