Escape
Before the execution could take place, Fairbanks escaped with the help of his brother, a cousin, a friend, and his nephew, Nathaniel Davis. A $1,000 bounty was placed on his head, and a newspaper headline screamed "Stop the Murderer!" The party tried to make their way to Canada, but stopped to eat in Skenesboro, now known as Whitehall, New York, just south of the Canadian border. Fairbanks was recaptured.
Fairbanks was returned to the Boston jail, for authorities no longer trusted the Dedham jail, and on September 10, 1801, Fairbanks was hanged at a massive event. He was twenty years old. Two Army cavalry companies and a volunteer militia unit made sure he did not escape again, and the 10,000 people who showed up at the Town Common to witness the execution were five times the town’s population at the time.
Within two days of his execution, the Report of the Trial of Jason Fairbanks was published. The story was then written up in a pamphlet entitled A Deed of Horror! Trial of Jason Fairbanks for the Murder of His Sweetheart in 1801. It became the basis for a novel called The Life of Jason Fairbanks: A Novel Founded on Fact, which is believed to no longer exist.
Read more about this topic: Jason Fairbanks
Famous quotes containing the word escape:
“Every boy was supposed to come into the world equipped with a father whose prime function was to be our father and show us how to be men. He can escape us, but we can never escape him. Present or absent, dead or alive, real or imagined, our father is the main man in our masculinity.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
“The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to be regarded,—the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we are; and love what is simple and beautiful; independence and cheerful relation, these are the essentials,—these, and the wish to serve,—to add somewhat to the well-being of men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)