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 pounded on the locked doors and windows with the authority of the federal government on their side, demanding that they surrender. Mary Kite, Elijah’s wife, refused the party entry; Elijah first agreed to let the authorities in but changed his mind.27 Outside, a crowd—composed of curious passersby, neighbors, proslavery and antislavery sympathizers, deputies, members of the press, and African Americans—gathered around the home and grew larger by the minute.
The deputies tried to force their way into the home. Cornered, the family scrambled, not sure what to do. Robert pulled out a pistol he had taken from his owner to protect his family’s freedom. The men had decided to “fight and die” rather than return to slavery. Surely, Robert had freedom and death on his mind as he fired at a deputy who tried to come through a window of the cabin. The bullet hit the deputy, shattering his teeth and leaving his finger hanging “by a mere thread.”28
The Garner men’s decision to resort to armed defense is remarkable for a few reasons. It was a powerful assertion of manhood neither ever had been able to assert in Kentucky: the power to protect their family from everything that had hurt them in the past, plus all that threatened to hurt them outside the doors of that Cincinnati home. Hence, they enacted a type of heroic power that was largely elusive for enslaved men. Moreover, it was a brazen act for African Americans to fire at white men—especially deputized federal authorities—who outnumbered them and had greater firepower. Their decision to use deadly force to avoid capture was not without precedent, though. Other fugitive slaves had used deadly force to avoid capture before the Garners, including in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851. Then, when Maryland slave owner Edward Gorsuch tried to reclaim his slaves from the home of free black William Parker, the armed inhabitants inside shot and killed him and gravely injured his sons.
There were consequences for shooting at white men in the Ohio Valley. Had the shooting occurred across the river in Kentucky, laws there decreed that an enslaved person convicted of maliciously shooting a free white person with the intent to kill could be punished by death, whipping, or imprisonment; a conviction for murdering a white person carried the death penalty.29 In Ohio, a free state, there were no specific laws against fugitives shooting, injuring, or killing white men, but black on white violence certainly would lead to an extralegal death sentence. African Americans’ armed resistance against whites in Cincinnati always prompted swift mob violence against the entire community. None of the consequences deterred Robert from firing a gun against white deputies.
Initially, Margaret, Mary, and the children were in the front room of the Kite