Nearly a decade ago, a friend of mine named Sherry Maddock read a biography of Lewis Hayden.
She was enthralled, as most people are, by the story of Hayden and his wife, Harriet, an enslaved couple in Lexington who in 1844 made a daring escape up North Limestone to Maysville, then across the Ohio River to freedom.
They were helped by two white Northerners, Delia Webster and Calvin Fairbanks, who worked for the Underground Railroad and were later imprisoned in Kentucky for their crime of helping the Haydens escape.
The Haydens moved to Boston where he became a well-known abolitionist, public speaker and Underground Railroad conductor who helped numerous people escape slavery, including the daring rescue of a former slave from jail, where he’d been arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act.
There’s so much more about Lewis Hayden — my former colleague, Tom Eblen, wrote a two part series on him here and here — and scholarship is turning up new and fascinating things about Lewis and Harriett every day.