In the mid-19th century, when the mere act of helping an enslaved African escape was punishable by years of brutal imprisonment, or worse, one man dared to defy the law in the name of faith and freedom. His name was Calvin Fairbank, a Methodist minister from New York who sacrificed nearly two decades of his life in Kentucky prisons for aiding enslaved Africans on their journey to freedom.
Calvin Fairbank was born on November 3, 1816, in the small town of Pike, New York. He grew up in a very religious family during a time when many people in western New York were turning to religion and pushing for social change, including abolitionism. At a Methodist meeting, Fairbank met two Africans who had escaped slavery. Hearing their painful stories inspired him to spend the rest of his life fighting against slavery.
At just 21 years old, Fairbank began his first act of resistance. While guiding a lumber raft down the Ohio River in 1837, he secretly helped an enslaved african man escape to freedom on the northern side of the river. This brave action was the start of his work on the Underground Railroad, where he later teamed up with well-known abolitionist Levi Coffin to help more people reach free states and Canada.
In 1840, the Methodist Episcopal Church licensed Fairbank to preach, and by 1842, he was ordained a minister. Four years later, in 1844, he enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, a place known for its strong anti-slavery beliefs. At Oberlin, he met other people who shared his views, including John M. Brown, who would later become a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Together, they took direct action to fight against slavery.
Fairbank’s devotion to abolitionism placed him at odds with many of his fellow pastors, especially those in the South, who used the scripture to justify slavery. While countless ministers thundered from pulpits about the “divine order” of slavery and warned enslaved Africans that disobedience would earn them a spot in hell fire, Fairbank read the Bible differently. Where others saw justification for control, he saw a call to liberation. While some pastors preached about obedience and used the story of the curse of Ham to justify the enslavement if Africans, Fairbank was quietly helping enslaved Africans escape.
On one mission to Kentucky, Fairbank planned to help the wife and children of Gilson Berry, a man who had escaped slavery. But when that plan didn’t work out, he met another family desperate for freedom, Lewis Hayden, his wife Harriet, and her son Joseph. When Fairbank asked Hayden why he wanted to be free, Hayden simply said, “Because I am a man.”
With the help of another abolitionist, Delia Webster, Fairbank smuggled the Hayden family across state lines, painting their faces with flour to pass as white and hiding the boy under a wagon seat. The plan worked, but only temporarily. On their return to Kentucky, Fairbank and Webster were arrested and charged with aiding runaways.
Webster was sentenced to two years but pardoned after two months. Fairbank was not so lucky. In 1845, he received a 15-year sentence, five years for each enslaved person he helped escape. After four years behind bars, Fairbank was finally released in 1849, thanks to the tireless efforts of his father and the fundraising of the man he helped escape, Lewis Hayden, now living free in Boston. Hayden raised $650 (equivalent to about $26,000 today) to buy Fairbank’s release.
Despite the torture he had endured in prison, Fairbank returned to the work of liberation. In 1851, he helped another enslaved woman, Tamar, escape from Kentucky to Indiana. Later that year, Kentucky marshals kidnapped Fairbank and took him back to their state for trial. In 1852, he was sentenced again, this time to a full 15 years.
At the time, Southern society clung to racist ideologies and even pseudoscientific justifications for slavery. One of the most disturbing examples was drapetomania, a so-called “mental illness” proposed by Southern physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851, which claimed that enslaved Africans who ran away from enslavement were suffering from a psychological defect. To those who subscribed to this twisted logic, people like Tamar weren’t asserting their humanity, they were “mentally sick.” But to Fairbank, who looked Tamar in the eyes and risked everything for her freedom, there was no illness to treat, only injustice to confront.
This second imprisonment was far more brutal. Fairbank was subjected to hard labour and, by his own account, was flogged almost everyday during his confinement. The torture was not simply punishment, it was meant to break his spirit. But he endured.
Fairbank was finally freed in 1864, amid the turbulence of the Civil War, thanks to a pardon from Acting Governor Richard T. Jacob.
After his release, Fairbank married Mandana Tileston, a woman who had waited 13 years for him. She had tirelessly campaigned for his freedom and moved close to his prison in Oxford, Ohio, to be near him. The couple had one child, Calvin Cornelius Fairbank, born in 1868. But Fairbank’s health was badly damaged by years of mistreatment in prison. He tried working for religious organizations and later opened a bakery in his community, but his financial hardship continued.
Mandana died of tuberculosis in 1876, and Fairbank eventually remarried. He published his memoir in 1890, Rev. Calvin Fairbank During Slavery Times: How He “Fought the Good Fight” to Prepare “the Way.” Despite the powerful testimony within, the book brought him little income.
Calvin Fairbank died on October 12, 1898, nearly blind and in poverty. He was buried in Angelica, New York, where his grave still lies in the “Until the Day Dawn Cemetery.”
Though his name is not as widely known as Harriet Tubman, William Still or Frederick Douglass, Calvin Fairbank stands among the bravest of the abolitionist movement.
Source:
https://archive.org/details/revcalvinfairban00lcfair/mode/1up?q=47
