If any one now thinks it impossible that a free people in the North could be so influenced, cowed, and blinded to the atrocities of slavery upon the free, let them read the biography of Southern prisons. It was a day of jubilee for the abolitionists (who had survived the horrid cruelties that made “Libby” a paradise) when the federal forces took possession of the South. The Rev. Calvin Fairbanks, after being kidnapped and serving horrible time for seventeen years and four months for being an abolitionist, was released from the state prison of Kentucky, at Frankfort, by a special order of President Lincoln. During the last two wardens of the prison--Zeb Ward and that of J. W. South--this man received thirty-five thousand stripes on his bare body with a strap of half-tanned leather a foot and a half long, often dipped in water to increase the pain. He was often whipped four times a day, receiving seventy stripes at each whipping; one time the number of lashes was increased to one hundred and seven. All this punishment was pretended to be inflicted on the grounds of failure to perform the daily task which had been fixed beyond possibility--requiring the prisoner to weave two hundred and eight yards of hemp cloth daily. Early in 1864, Mr. Lincoln learned through Miss Tileston of the cruelties practiced upon Mr. Fairbanks, and sent General Fry to Kentucky with orders to make it “Fairbanks Day” at Frankfort prison. “When released, Mr. Fairbanks says he crossed the river and kissed the free soil in Ohio,” where he met the girl who, on hearing of his misfortune in Massachusetts, came to Ohio and engaged as teacher at Hamilton, and then at Oxford, supplying him with such comforts as was within her power--worked and petitioned and watched over the border for many long years with the love of a true woman. Slavery is no more--the dark blotch to freedom has been wiped out with the best blood of the nation. It was a contentious, political evil as well. But slavery of the colored race is not the only evil, the only danger, that can arise to overthrow a Republican form of government. The first thirty-five years of the existence of Ohio as a state may be recognized, in an educational point of view, as the period of the “_Three R’s_”--“_readin, ’riten, and ’rithmetic_”--for state legislation made it so. There were no public schools, no academy, but one higher institution in operation, called an “Ohio University,” located at Athens, in Athens county. This was opened for students, in 1809, with the classic course; and the first class, numbering two, graduated in 1815, receiving the first collegiate degrees ever conferred under the endowment for education by the act of 1787--John Hunter, A. M., and Thomas Ewing, A. M.