“I piloted them through the forests mostly by night … girls dressed as ladies; men and boys as gentlemen or servants; men in women’s clothes and women in men’s clothes … on foot or on horseback, in buggies, carriages, common bags … swimming or wading chin deep, or in boats or skiffs; on rafts, and often on a pine log. And I never suffered one to be recaptured.” – Calvin Fairbank

Kentucky activists

A Methodist minister from New York, Rev. Fairbank used Cincinnati as his headquarters for traveling into the South to guide runaways out during the 1840s.

His luck ran out in 1844 when he and fellow white abolitionist Delia Webster openly transported Lewis Hayden and his family from enslavement in Kentucky. On their return to Kentucky, Webster and Fairbank were arrested, tried and convicted of helping slaves to run away. Webster was released after several months before being pardoned. Fairbank fared much worse: he served 5 years of a 15-year sentence in the Kentucky State penitentiary.

Fairbank was freed after the man he rescued, Lewis Hayden, had campaigned for his release. For his part, Hayden had moved to Boston and become a major force in the fight against slavery. He and his wife Harriet housed runaways in their home. He boasted that he kept gunpowder underneath the front stoop of his home and threatened to blow up the entire house rather than ever surrender a fugitive.

But neither Fairbank nor Webster were finished with their rescue work. In 1851, Fairbank was again arrested and convicted of helping a runaway woman escape in Indiana. This time he served 15 years of hard labor in the penitentiary. He later claimed that during one 8-year period behind bars, he suffered more than 35,000 lashes from whippings.

Webster, meanwhile, in 1852 bought land in Kentucky where she started a farm colony worked by freed slaves. The neighbors were sure she was using that as a front to rescue runaways, and they finally chased her from Kentucky in 1854.