Before the war, the clearest American political prisoners were the underground railroad's captured conductors, punished under slave-state law for helping human beings escape. Charles Torrey, a Massachusetts minister credited with aiding some 400 escapes, was convicted in Maryland in 1844 and died of tuberculosis in the state penitentiary in 1846, refused a pardon; his funeral made him abolition's martyr. Jonathan Walker, a Massachusetts sea captain caught carrying seven fugitives by boat from Florida, was pilloried and branded on the hand with "S.S." — slave stealer — a mark John Greenleaf Whittier's verse turned into a badge of honor.
Calvin Fairbank suffered longest: convicted in Kentucky in 1845 for helping Lewis Hayden's family escape, pardoned in 1849, then seized again in 1851, he served a combined seventeen years in the Kentucky penitentiary, where by his own count he was flogged more than a thousand times before his 1864 release. Their sentences established a template that would recur throughout American history — the state punishing as theft or treason what the movement understood as rescue.