A Black Commander of the Abolition Movement

"David Ruggles is now one of the forgotten heroes of the abolitionist struggle," wrote Dorothy B. Porter in an address to the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1942. "Through a queer arbitrary ordering of things or through unfortunate oversight of the historians, his memory has been almost wholly neglected, and his activities as a tireless fighter in the cause of abolition virtually forgotten."¹ The same words could be said today, over half a century later, as Ruggles has remained an elusive character. His associates and protégés, the most famous of whom was Frederick Douglass, cited him as an important influence, and he appears as a walk-on player in their biographies and along the margins of accounts of antislavery activity throughout the Northeast.² Yet he himself has never been a major player in a monograph, much less the subject of a biography. This has been an unfortunate oversight because Ruggles was the link connecting abolitionist networks in New England, upstate New York, and Pennsylvania; class and ideological differences within both Manhattan's black community and the abolitionist movement; and various strains of nineteenth-century reform. Graham Russell Gao Hodges' biography fills this gap by taking the forgotten Ruggles and placing him at the center of the abolitionist struggle in the 1830s and 1840s.

If there was a generation of African American Founding Fathers, then David Ruggles was their grandchild. He and his parents had been born into freedom in a state that was phasing out slavery at a time in which blacks had a history of self-emancipation though military service and lawsuits. Although the family was poor by the standards of the Norwich community where Ruggles spent his childhood, they were privileged by comparison to the majority of African Americans. His parents, a blacksmith and a cook, held respected positions in an integrated community, attending an integrated Congregational church. Although Connecticut citizens could not be considered truly abolitionist, they certainly did not support slavery, as evidenced in print by both white and black writers. Ruggles also benefited from the tutelage of Lydia Huntley Sigourney at Norwich's Sabbath School for the Poor. "Unlike virtually every other African American memoirist, Ruggles did not recall a terrible day when racial prejudice intruded upon childhood friendship," writes Hodges. "Rather, the lessons he learned in Connecticut were about racial equality" (pp. 17–18).

Lessons in racial harmony do not always translate into lived experience. Furthermore, as John Lofton has written, those who are closest to the ideal of equality, yet barred from admittance, often become the most militant of activists.³ Hodges dates the beginning of Ruggles' activist awakening to his youthful seafaring, which ultimately settled him in Manhattan. Maritime historian Jeffery Bolster has described the paradox of black sailors who worked side-by-side with white shipmates who formed a class-based community rife with radicalism, only to be reminded on shore that racial prejudice limited any semblance of freedom they enjoyed.⁴ In his two years as a mariner, Ruggles' visits to ports exposed him to the working-class activism that became an important component of his own abolitionism and introduced him to key figures who would serve as connections in an abolitionist network known as the Underground Railroad. In particular, Hodges points to the black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts, meticulously documented by Kathryn Grover, as demonstrating to the teenaged Ruggles the threats and the possibilities of abolitionism.⁵ Still, Ruggles ultimately chose Manhattan for his home, and Hodges vividly conveys that, much for the same reasons that the city had become a major center of commerce, it also became a locus for far-reaching, organized abolitionism.

When Ruggles settled in New York in 1827, he found an African American community under siege. With the threat of kidnapping at the hands of slave catchers, lack of due process in...