—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, and canning food. In addition to farmwork and house duties, enslaved women on small farms would have also been charged with minding the children of their owners. Without a doubt, the work was exhausting and perpetual.
Enslaved Kentuckians would have been on call virtually around the clock, with little privacy or time to themselves. Many did not even have separate living quarters. Added to that misery, those enslaved on small farms had more daily contact with their owners, which proved harmful, in most cases. The greater contact with owners increased the likelihood that they would endure not only more racist verbal insults and physical assaults, but sexual abuse as well. Given their low numbers per farm, Kentucky slaves were geographically isolated from other African Americans. In short, enslaved Kentuckians did not have much access to, or opportunity to participate in, a viable community. Without the comfort and support of a community, despair, isolation, and hopelessness could easily consume them.8
Although enslavement on small Kentucky farms clearly was difficult, the disposition and character of the owner trumped all other conditions in determining the quality of bondage. Being overworked, isolated, and overly exposed to indignities were characteristic of slavery on small Kentucky farms. An exacting, abusive, and cruel owner made things worse. To be enslaved on a small farm with such an owner was—as far as the Garner family was concerned—worse than death. The Garners’ collective and individual histories teach us that the brutality or mildness of slavery depended not just on the region or the kind of crop enslaved people tended to, but the character of the owner.
THE GAINES FAMILY
Archibald Kinkead Gaines, born 1 January 1808, was the eighth of thirteen children of Susan Elizabeth Mathews (who went by Elizabeth) and Abner LeGrand Gaines. Native Virginians, the Gaineses had migrated to Boone County, Kentucky, in the early nineteenth century. Abner Gaines purchased 236 acres of land, which lay at a transportation junction in Boone County. Soon a small settlement called Gaines Crossroads sprang up near his land. Gaines Crossroads and the town born of it eventually became Walton, Kentucky. Abner operated a farm, a mail stage line, and a tavern that was frequented by travelers en route to Lexington. In addition to running his tavern, he also acted as the town’s justice of the peace and sheriff. Upon his death in 1839, Abner left nearly all of his estimated $12,000–$15,000 in wealth to his youngest daughter, including his farm, home, tavern, livestock, and two slaves. He willed the other Gaines children $1,000 each and various keepsakes. Elizabeth, his widow and the family matriarch, inherited only the furniture and a carriage. Shortly after her husband’s death, she moved in with their second-oldest son, John Pollard Gaines, at his farm in nearby Richwood.9
The Gaineses had a high sense of obligation to one another. Just as John Pollard had done with the family matriarch, other family members took in relatives from time to time. For example, it was not unusual for an uncle to have his niece or nephew in his home for some time. The naming patterns in the Gaines family also reveal that they honored their kin with each birth. Sons were not named after their fathers, as one might expect, but received the first or middle names of an uncle, brother, grandfather, or even family friend. Male names John, Pollard, Abner, and LeGrand were recycled in several generations in various combinations. Similarly,