For Frederick Douglass' Paper.

CALVIN FAIRBANK.

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Refugee Home School,

Nov. 30th 1854

FRIEND FREDERICK:—An inquiry appeared in your paper, a few months since, for Calvin Fairbank. A voice has just reached us, from him in "Frankfort Prison," through a friend, who called on us by his request—has been his room-mate from the time he entered the penitentiary, until the first of the present month, (Nov.) We, therefore, hasten to respond, bearing to "many inquirers" painful tidings of the severe treatment he has been, and is still receiving, at the hands of Kentucky authorities, whose "tender mercies are cruel." On account of which, his health became much impaired; but thro' the kindness of the physician and foreman of the prison, his health, up to the first, was improving.

We give facts, as received from the friend above referred to. Calvin's brother applied to the Governor of Kentucky for pardon, by paying whatever might be required for Tamer, (the aided slave,) but was repulsed by the unrelenting reply, "Mr. Fairbank, you may as well understand first as last, that all the wealth of Kentucky would not make me pardon your brother. He cannot be pardoned." Upon which, he begged the privilege of Craig (the warden of the prison) to permit his unfortunate brother to receive small sums of money, as other prisoners did; but this favor was also denied.—After which, Mr. Craig asked Calvin if he would have Tamer brought back, if, upon her rendition, the authorities would pardon him? The reply was, "I cannot conscientiously consent to such a proposition. As hard as it is, to be forever in this world separated from all that life holds dear, I must yield to my hard fate and die within this prison wall."—He was then placed under still more severe discipline. When news reached the prison that Craig was shot at Madison, Ind., in the Delia Webster affair, (the circumstances of which are familiar to all the readers of the public journals of the North,) Calvin made the inadvertent remark, that it was good enough for him, as he had no business in Madison. Whereupon a fellow-prisoner informed against him, and he was arraigned befoe his cruel persecutor, (Craig,) and received by his order, fifty-nine lashes on the bare back, ten more than the extent of the prison law, leaving from the neck to the small of the back, one gore of mangled flesh; then placed him in the dungeon for a specified time, with orders to be taken from thence (if alive) and put into the hackle-house, (to hackle hemp, exceedingly laborious, mostly used for punishing prisoners,) to be kept there until he should die, not permitting him to speak to anyone, and if he did, it was to be reported to him (Craig.)—As a friend passed that dismal dungeon, and heard his piteous groans, after the scourging, he went to the prison hospital and obtained sweet oil, with which he anointed the quivering flesh of the sufferer. As Bennet (the foreman) took from the dungeon, the trembling and already enfeebled victim of Craig's demaniac fury, he said, "I suppose, Mr. Fairbank, we have got to obey orders, and kill you!" This being uttered in a trembling undertone, bespoke the deep heavings of stifled sympathy, which seems to have been discovered by Craig, by the threats that Bennet, too, should receive the lash to the extent of the law, if he did not carry out his orders strictly. But Calvin failed so fast that the physician said he could not long survive in the hackle-house, and ordered the foreman toremove him and place him again in the loom, which was done.

It was deeply affecting to listen to the narration of the cruelties inflicted upon one who was taken by force from Indiana shores, vilely thrown into Louisville jail, permitted only a mock trial, upon whom was practiced almost every form of fraud, deceit and villainy, that fiends in human form could devise; and then to drag out a miserable existence in a Kentucky penitentiary—a living martyr —being sacrificed upon the deeply dyed altar of slavery's bloody moloch.

None but those whose hearts were seared by the withering and blighting influence of that doubly-distilled essence of all iniquity, AMERICAN SLAVERY, could listen to the relation of Calvin Fairbank's sufferings, and not feel that our government is full of wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores. There can be no soundness in it; surely its disease is incorrigible. When such diabolical deeds are being committed without the utterance of a disapproving sentence from a vast majority, we have no grounds to hope for reformation only in REVOLUTION.

How long shall the wailings of the slave and the evils of those who are remembering him in his chains, swell the bosom of sympathy? How long must our ears be pained, and our heart made sick, with every day's report of wrong and outrage, with which these United States are filled? How long will it be ere the triumph of jubilee shall be sounded throughout all the land, and liberty be proclaimed to ALL the inhabitants thereof?

As ever yours for suffering humanity,

LAURA S. HAVILAND.