SLAVERYTHE KENTUCKY RAID
SLAVES IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY, 1840 TO 1860, AND FREEDMEN IN NORTHERN KENTUCKY, 1870
County Boone
1840
1850
1860
1870
2,183
2,104
1,745
1,012
Bracken
819
840
750
636
Campbell
289
177
116
282
Carroll
731
949
1,045
540
Gallatin
604
704
708
690
Grant
348
532
696
509
Kenton
751
830
567
1,656
Mason
4,309
4,284
3,772
3,582
Owen
1,281
1,514
1,660
1,176
437
509
424
641
Pendleton Robertson*
257 11,752
12,443
11,483
10,981
*Robertson Co. was not established until 1867.
SLAVERY IN BOONE CO. Most Boone Co. farms in the 19th century had a handful of enslaved persons, who worked the fields in good weather and performed household tasks or honed their skills as coopers, wheel-makers, and blacksmiths after the growing season. “Slavery,” according to Jane Smiley, a presentday commentator on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “was an economic system dependent upon bankers” as well as on farmers and plantation owners. The rationale for enslavement ranged from biblical quotes to claims of white intellectual superiority to “simple economic interest and convenience.” In Boone Co., the demand for slaves was sufficiently low that at times slaves were sold out of the county, often to markets that supplied the Deep South. But the economic system of slavery was a lively enterprise for many Boone Countians from the time of the county’s formation in 1799 until the end of the Civil War. The assessed value of most adult slaves was between 10 and 20 times the value of an acre of land. Surnames of Boone Co. slaveholders include Brashear, Coleman, Dinsmore, Gaines, Johnson, Parker, and Riddell. Enslaved blacks comprised one-fifth to one-quarter of the county’s population from 1799 to 1860. Free blacks represented a tiny minority. After the end of the Civil War, African Americans exited Boone Co. en masse. Remote areas of Boone Co. such as Rabbit Hash and the North Bend Bottoms were prime areas for escape from bondage. Active Underground Railroad connections in Indiana and Ohio beckoned enslaved persons in Boone Co. The best-known fugitive slave story in Boone Co. is that of Margaret Garner, who was enslaved by Archibald Gaines of the Maplewood Farm, Richwood. She was the central character in the 20th-century novel and movie Beloved, and the Margaret Garner Opera played at Music Hall in Cincinnati during summer 2005. All three art forms have drawn attention to the tragic story of this pregnant enslaved mother of four who fled with her family on a frigid January
night in 1856. The Garners tasted a few sweet hours of freedom in Cincinnati before the family was captured. Margaret slit the throat of her young daughter Mary and attempted to kill her other three children, declaring that she would rather see them dead than enslaved. Margaret did not hang for the murder of her child. Instead, she was remanded to the custody of Gaines, who sent Margaret and her husband to a plantation in the Deep South. Margaret died there in 1858. On March 21, 2005, students from St. Joseph Academy in Walton dedicated a memorial to the Underground Railroad in Boone Co. The inscription remembers and honors “all the slaves in Boone Co., those who helped them, and the slaves’ descendants.” The memorial is the first of its kind in the county. Boone Co. Heritage Education Curriculum. River Born, Kentucky Bred. Burlington, Ky.: Boone Co. Historic Preservation Review Board, 2001. McNutt, Randy. “Boone Grows Big, Stays Small,” CE, April 29, 2003, 2E. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Jane Smiley. New York: Random House, 2001. Tanner, Paul. Slavery in Boone County (And Its Aftermath). Frankfort, Ky.: P. Tanner, 1986. Yanuck, Julius. “The Garner Fugitive Slave Case,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 15, no. 1 (June 1953): 47– 66.
Jannes W. Garbett
SLAVERY—THE KENTUCKY RAID (also known as the Cassopolis Outrage). Two large groups of enslaved people, altogether numbering at least 35, escaped from Kenton and Boone counties during spring 1847. The first party of 22 departed Saturday night, April 24; the second group followed a couple of weeks later. Aided by “conductors” of the Underground Railroad, both groups traveled north through Ohio and Indiana and on into Michigan. There, in the southwestern part of the state, they found refuge in rural Cass Co.
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The fugitives from slavery spent the summer in Cass Co., living and working on farms owned by Quakers. They joined a growing black pioneer population that included free African Americans who had migrated to this Northern refuge site. Cass Co.’s abolitionist reputation also caught the attention of white Kentuckians, including several aggrieved slave owners in Boone and Kenton counties. The slaveholders hired a spy to pursue their missing human “property.” Around June 1847, the spy arrived in Michigan, posing as an abolitionist from Massachusetts seeking subscribers for antislavery periodicals. Using this guise, he traveled from farm to farm, talking with the locals and secretly creating a map detailing the fugitives’ whereabouts. He then returned to Kentucky and issued his report. A posse was gathered, comprised of 22 slave owners and their agents. Fully armed, and with wagons equipped to transport captives back to Kentucky, the slave-catchers arrived in Cass Co. on August 20, 1847. In the early hours of that Friday morning, the posse split into smaller raiding parties and set out to capture fugitives simultaneously at four different farms. As dawn broke, the slave-catchers pounded on cabin doors and began their roundup. At some farms they captured entire families; at others, either a wife or a daughter escaped and sounded the alarm. As the alarm spread, the raiding parties attempted to rendezvous at the local mill with their 10 captives. The Kentuckians soon found themselves surrounded by a growing number of locals, both black and white, who were armed with guns, axes, hoes, straw-cutters, and even fence posts that they had hastily pulled out of the ground. The Kentuckians, in turn, brandished their guns and bowie knives. Violence was averted when the Kentuckians agreed to take their captives to the county courthouse and submit proof of their ownership claims to a judge. The entourage of slave-hunters, captured fugitives, and determined locals marched off together to the courthouse in Cassopolis, the county seat. Word of the raid continued to spread over the course of their five-mile trek, and the number of Michiganders in the crowd swelled to 200 or 300. When they all arrived in town, 14 of the Kentuckians were arrested for attempted kidnapping, trespassing, and assault and battery. They also were served with a writ of habeas corpus, requiring that they produce the people they had abducted before the court. The Kentuckians posted bail and awaited trial. The county’s judge was unavailable, so the neighboring Berry Co. commissioner presided over the habeas corpus trial. Unbeknownst to the white Southerners, the commissioner was an abolitionist and a covert member of the Underground Railroad. When the Kentuckians appeared before him to prove their ownership claims, the commissioner refused each type of evidence they presented, such as bills of sale and power-of-attorney documents. Instead, he insisted that they produce Kentucky’s statutes proving that slavery was legal in the state. Although the statutes clearly existed, the Kentuckians did not have them in their possession and the commissioner denied them time to