By Graham Hodges

In early September, 1838, the man who would become Frederick Douglass, the foremost black abolitionist of the nineteenth century, arrived in New York City, well aware that he still faced danger from the “slave catchers” who roamed the streets seeking to kidnap unwary blacks. Through fortuitous circumstance, Frederick Bailey, as he was then called, soon met David Ruggles, the city’s leading black abolitionist—and Frederick Douglass’ first and perhaps most influential professor of radical abolitionism.

David Ruggles, the subject of my new biography, was born of free parents in Norwich, Connecticut on March 15, 1810. His father David, Sr. was a blacksmith. His mother, Nancy, was a noted local caterer. David, Jr., the oldest of six children, studied at Congregational and Methodist charity schools. At fifteen, he left home to become a mariner and arrived in New York City just before slavery ended in 1827. Ruggles soon opened a temperance grocery and became a protégée of Samuel Eli Cornish, abolitionist minister and founder of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first black newspaper. Other powerful influences on Ruggles were David Walker, Maria Stewart, and William Lloyd Garrison. By 1834, Ruggles worked as an agent for the Liberator and Emancipator, wrote dozens of lengthy letters to the editor and began penning his own pamphlets.

Frederick Bailey arrived in New York City the morning of September 3, 1838. Broke, lonely, and frightened, his newly gained freedom was endangered in a city described by its leading black abolitionist, David Ruggles (1810-1849), as a slave catchers’ paradise. An acquaintance warned Bailey not to go anywhere near the Tombs, the city’s notorious jail, because of the Darg Case, a high-profile slave rescue case. Tom Hughes, the self-emancipated slave, had taken ten thousand dollars from his master when he fled from bondage. Helping Hughes were Isaac Hopper, the venerable Quaker radical, Barney Corse, head of the New York Manumission Society, and Ruggles, secretary and chief activist of the New York Committee of Vigilance. All three had been jailed on charges of attempting extortion from John Darg, the slave master of Hughes.

Luckily, another black, a sailor named Stuart, guided Bailey to David Ruggles’ home at 36 Lispenard Street at the corner of Church Street. There they found succor from kidnappers who roamed the streets searching for unwary blacks. For years these human bloodhounds had grabbed people of color, hauled them before a compliant magistrate named Richard Riker, and after a sham trial, had shipped them south into the voracious slave markets. Ruggles denounced such practices in dozens of public meetings, in newspapers editorials, several pamphlets, and in the Mirror of Liberty, his pioneering abolitionist magazine.

In Ruggles’ home, Bailey married his fiancé, Anna Murray. James W. C. Pennington, known as the Fugitive Blacksmith and now a Presbyterian minister in Hartford, Connecticut, performed the marriage ceremony. Bailey then took on a new name, Johnson, which he used until he moved, at Ruggles’ suggestion, to New Bedford, Massachusetts, the “Fugitive’s Gibraltar.” There, he became Frederick Douglass and embarked on his career as one of nineteenth-century America’s most illustrious persons and its most noted abolitionist. Much has been made of the influence of William Lloyd Garrison and, later, Gerrit Smith and Abraham Lincoln, on Douglass’ intellectual and political development. Douglass famously commented: “I have been asked where I got my education. I have answered, from Massachusetts Abolition University, Mr. Garrison, President.”

Douglass, whose thirst for knowledge is well known, had to be impressed by what he found at Ruggles’ home. The house was now the city’s first reading room and circulating library run by a man of color. Located in Ruggles’ home, which served as the office of the New York Committee of Vigilance, the lending library gave readers access to “the principal daily and leading antislavery papers, and other popular periodicals of the day.

36 Lispenard Street, New York, N.Y., where David Ruggles sheltered Frederick Douglass. Photo by Graham Hodges.

Ruggles opened the library because blacks were excluded from most “Reading Rooms, popular lectures, and all places of literary attraction.” Ruggles hoped that the reading room would attract for “all young men whose mental appetites thirst for food,” and would help them avoid the constant presence of vice. Annual subscriptions cost $2.75, though “strangers visiting this city can have access to the Reading Room, free of charge,” an open invitation to fugitive slaves needing spiritual and intellectual uplift. When Frederick Bailey and his wife traveled to their new home in New Bedford, they took with them a treasured marriage license, a five-dollar bill, a letter of introduction from Ruggles, and a deep commitment to the abolitionist movement.

Douglass admired the New York City activist and described Ruggles succinctly in his famous 1845 narrative: “though watched and hemmed in on almost every side, he seemed to be more than a match for his enemies.” In his second narrative, published in 1855, Douglass recalled “Mr. Ruggles as the first officer of the under-ground railroad with whom I met after reaching the north, and, indeed, the first of whom I ever heard anything, about the network to help free enslaved blacks. David Ruggles was a physically imposing man. Surviving evidence from images and his letters indicate that he was tall, strong, dark-skinned, and had a penchant for dandy attire.

Sadly, Ruggles suffered from severe bowel disorders, which eventually killed him at the age of thirty-nine. His eyesight went from weak to blindness by the time he was thirty. Completely devoted to the struggle against slavery and for black civil rights, he never married and had only occasional contact with his family after moving to New York City. By other’s accounts we can tell that he could be irascible, opinionated, selfless, and exceptionally brave. Those qualities propelled him to the leadership of New York’s battle against slavery by the mid 1830s.

David Ruggles helped, by his own count, over six hundred black men and women ensure the freedom they sought by escaping from slave masters. Ruggles sheltered self-emancipated people, spent many hours celebrating their freedom and instilling in them a powerful commitment to “practical abolitionism.” He invented this term because:

“To effect a mighty revolution, such as the general abolition of slavery, requires agents, and funds, and time, and influence . . . but while we long and labor for the accomplishment of this noble cause, let us not lose sight of the minor evils, which tend in the aggregate to make up that monstrous system of inequity; let us in every case of oppression and wrong, inflicted on our brethren, prove our sincerity, by alleviating their sufferings, affording them protection, giving them counsel, and thus in our individual spheres of action, prove ourselves practical abolitionists.”

The constant battle against cruel slave catchers ruined Ruggles’ health. By 1841, he moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, joined a utopian community, and became a doctor of hydrotherapy. Ruggles became nationally-known for his methods of using “cutaneous electricity” to determine a patient’s ailments. Unable to see, he would pass his hands over the person’s body and then prescribe a regimen of cold water treatments. At the time of his death, he operated a small hospital with over twenty patients, among whom had been William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth and the wife of John Brown. While practicing medicine, Ruggle continued his work the Underground Railroad. Soon a small black community of former slaves lived near his home. .

Ruggles and Douglass maintained contact. In 1841, Douglass chaired a meeting endorsing Ruggles’ act of civil disobedience against Jim Crow railroad practices in New England. Douglass became an agent for the Mirror of Liberty. When Douglass’ fame soared, he visited Ruggles often in Northampton and the latter supported his protégés’ fledgling newspaper in 1848. Ruggles died of his many ailments in December 1849. Shortly after, Douglass eulogized: “He has literally worn himself out in humanity’s struggle. … To the cause of Hydrotherapy, the Anti-Slavery movement, and to the cause of humanity in general, his loss is irreparable. We look in vain for another to fill his place.”

Frederick Douglass recognized how important Ruggles was to the movement and to his own life. In his short life, Ruggles lifted the Underground Railroad from its scattered parts into a unified, bi-racial force that became the greatest grassroots challenge to slavery. As a journalist, community organizer and practical abolitionist, Ruggles marked the pathway for Douglass, William Cooper Nell, James W. C. Pennington and scores of other black activists. Ruggles deserves to be in the top pantheon of American heroes.

Graham Russell Gao Hodges is the George Dorland Langdon, Jr. Professor of History and Africana Studies at Colgate University. Among his many books are Root & Branch: African Americans in New York City and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). His new book, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (University of North Carolina Press) appears this month.