Ruggles, David

By: Graham Russell Gao Hodges

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Ruggles, David

(b. 15 March 1810; d. 18 December 1849),
journalist and abolitionist.

The son of free blacks, David and Nancy Ruggles, David Ruggles was born in Norwich on the Connecticut coast and educated at Sabbath schools in the abolition-oriented Congregational Church. After a brief period of seafaring and a brush with crime, Ruggles moved to New York City in 1827 and opened a grocery. Initially he sold alcohol but soon converted to temperance. Ruggles became involved in the burgeoning abolitionist movement in New York City by employing fugitive slaves, including Samuel Ringgold Ward, the future abolitionist and newspaper editor. In 1833 Ruggles closed the store and became a full-time agent for the Emancipator and Journal of Public Morals, the organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. He frequently spoke against colonization at rallies around the mid-Atlantic region and gained contacts valuable for his later work in the Underground Railroad. Ruggles believed firmly in education and reading, working to establish the Phoenix High School for Colored Youth, which by 1837 employed thirteen teachers. He also organized the Garrison Literary and Benevolent Association. Similar to other self-help organizations blacks formed in the 1830s, the association was intended to help boys from ages four to twenty improve in literature, morals, and the mechanical arts. In early 1834 Ruggles wrote a series of influential articles in which he urged blacks to support abolitionist newspapers. In his Manhattan home at 37 Lispenard Street, Ruggles opened a reading room, lending library, and bookstore. The bookstore and library were the first such institutions in the United States owned and operated by an African American. A mob destroyed them in November 1835.

Ruggles frequently wrote letters to the editors of abolitionist and commercial newspapers. He also composed his own pamphlets. His first published pamphlet was an anticolonization diatribe titled Extinguisher, Extinguished … or David M. Reese, M.D. “Used Up!” The piece focused on the activities of Dr. Reese, a leading physician, proponent of the American Colonization Society, and frequent critic of abolitionism. Ruggles sarcastically dissected Reese's arguments in favor of colonization and found his conclusions “stale.” Ruggles turned proslavery anxieties about mixed-race sexual relationships upside down in his pamphlet The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment by the American Churches, which he published in 1835 on his own imprint, another first for African Americans. The pamphlet urged northern white women to shun the wives of southern slaveholders who traveled north for vacations, arguing that the southern women acquiesced in the rape and concubinage of black women that their husbands and sons committed. Emerging feminists such as Angelina Grimké used Ruggles's arguments in their speeches.

In 1835 Ruggles expanded his radical approach to abolition as a founding officer of the New York Committee of Vigilance, an organization devoted to assisting fugitives from slavery to gain legal freedom or transfer to the safer northern states and Canada. Ruggles worked closely with the venerable Isaac Hopper to establish this early version of the Underground Railroad. In its first annual report, written largely by Ruggles, the committee chronicled innumerable cases in which it saved fugitives from returning to the south and slavery. One self-emancipated slave Ruggles helped was Frederick Bailey, who later changed his name to Frederick Douglass. Ruggles directly confronted slave catchers in the street. On one occasion he traveled to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to order the arrest of a ship's captain whom Ruggles accused of illicit slave trading. For this and other actions, Ruggles needed his quick wits and legal knowledge to avoid being kidnapped and taken south into servitude. Ruggles continued to publicize his views in myriad newspapers and did not hesitate to name slave catchers, judges who were sympathetic to slavery, and city dwellers who held blacks in unlawful servitude. Ruggles published more accounts of his activities in the four issues of his magazine, the Mirror of Liberty, the first African American periodical. In the magazine he included more case accounts, poetry, attacks on slavery, and news of the New York Committee of Vigilance. In 1838 Ruggles published An Antidote for a Poisonous Combination, another pamphlet dismissing the arguments of Dr. David M. Reese.

Ruggles's zeal brought trouble to him and other black abolitionists in 1839 when the keeper of a black boarding- house won a libel suit against Ruggles and a black newspaper published by Samuel Eli Cornish. Without the publisher's permission, Ruggles printed an article in the Colored American claiming the hotelier trafficked in slaves. The dispute nearly bankrupted the newspaper and caused rifts not only between Ruggles and his longtime ally, Cornish, but also within the community of black abolitionists in New York. Eventually, Ruggles lost his post as secretary of the Committee of Vigilance because of the lawsuit. Broken in health, he left New York City in 1840. For much of the next year, Ruggles traveled around New England, attending fetes and raising money for his efforts. He pioneered protest against discrimination on railroads when he was arrested in 1841 for refusing to move to a segregated car.

In November 1841 Ruggles joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry and became an important member, serving as a mediator between feuding members of the society. Anxious about his worsening blindness and intestinal troubles, Ruggles became an adherent and soon a practitioner of hydrotherapy. By 1845 he had raised sufficient capital to construct one of the nation's first water-cure hospitals. There he treated many patients, including Sojourner Truth and William Lloyd Garrison as well as the wife of a slave owner. Ruggles continued his abolitionist work and made Northampton a center for fugitives from slavery. He prospered in his medical work until his intestinal ailments returned in December 1849 and caused his death at the age of thirty-nine.

See also American Colonization Society; Black Abolitionists; Black Press; Cornish, Samuel; Garrison, William Lloyd; Grimké, Angelina; Underground Railroad; and Ward, Samuel R.

processed xml | source xml