Trial & sentence of Calvin Fairbank

March 7, 1845  

The Judge sentences  Fairbanks to hard labor for a total of fifteen years, five years for each of three indictments against him. The three indictments include one for having enticed a slave named Louis to leave his owners, one for abetting the escape of a slave named Harriet, property of Patterson Bain, and the third regarding a boy named Joe, property of Bain. In the trial Fairbanks professes penitence … “he lamented that he engaged in any enterprise of the kind, but protested  the conscience sense of duty under which he then acted, the result of his early education; said that he now believed that he was wrong; that he had found that the efforts of the abolitionists , instead of ameliorating, had only served to embitter the fate of the slaves; that they, the slaves, were more comfortably situated here than any of their comrades who had escaped, and concluded by imploring their clemency.”  The trial took place in Lexington, Kentucky.