Bound for Canaan (25 page)

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The Vigilance Committee consisted of about one hundred members, headed by a steering committee of five or six men led by Ruggles. Members financed the committee almost entirely with collections taken up among blacks. Each member carried a small book and entered in it the names of ten or twelve of his or her friends, and solicited from each a donation of one penny each week. In its first year the committee raised a total of $839.52, and disbursed $1228.71. The difference was probably made up from lump-sum contributions by wealthy whites, including the Tappans and Gerrit Smith, whom Ruggles had already approached for aid in establishing a school for African Americans.

Beyond its organizational structure, the committee was something new as a variant of the Underground Railroad. It was confrontational and street smart, and it was run almost entirely by African Americans. For the most part, it dispensed with the spiritualizing sanctimony that character
ized white abolitionist organizations. Blacks did not have to explain to themselves, or to anyone else, why they thought slavery was wrong, and why something must be done about it, and immediately. Ruggles was not a pacifist. He wrote, “We cannot recommend non-resistance to persons who are denied the protection of equitable law, when their liberty is invaded and their lives endangered by avaricious kidnappers.” Northern blacks had grown up in what were legally slave states only a few years earlier, and nearly all were just one or at most two generations removed from slavery themselves. Fugitive slaves were an integral part of their daily lives; they worked with them, they lived with them, they were married to them. Freeborn and fugitive alike knew that at any time they could be kidnapped and taken away to the South. Fugitives' fear of recapture was part of their own fear, emancipation an imperative that all could share.

While Ruggles accepted whites as allies—his closest was the elderly Isaac Hopper—he by no means regarded them as superiors, or as the natural leaders of the abolition movement. “The American Anti-Slavery Society has nothing to do ‘officially' with concealing, abducting, or rescuing fugitive slaves,” he stated. “The only ‘combination organized' for any purpose relative to refugees is the New York Committee of Vigilance, which is an organization deriving no power, authority or instruction from the American Anti-Slavery Society, and having no connection with it at all.” Initial expectations for the committee were not high. Even many of its supporters considered its plans both hazardous and hopeless. Ruggles, however, acted with a boldness that New Yorkers had never witnessed before on the part of a politically engaged black man. For the next three years he would yield ground to no one, even in the face of physical violence and withering prejudice. He also gave some of the men who appointed him more than they bargained for.

The committee's highest priority was the epidemic of kidnappings. “Let parents, and guardians, and children take warning. Our city is infested with a gang of kidnappers—Let every man look to his safety,” the committee warned. “Colored people should mark the signs of the times, and be warned!” In particular, black sailors who signed on board southbound vessels were in danger of being sold there as slaves. The case of young Edward Watson illustrates all too sadly the official inertia against which Ruggles had to struggle. Watson was apprenticed to a man named Ayres, who arranged with the captain of the brig
Buenos Aires
to use him as
a sailor and then sell him into slavery when the ship reached South Carolina. Learning of this beforehand, Ruggles applied for a writ of habeas corpus to one Judge Irving, but the magistrate refused on the ground that he felt ill and wanted to go to bed. A second judge refused to issue the writ because he was preparing to eat dinner, and ordered Ruggles out of his house. By the time Ruggles had obtained the writ, the next day, the boy had already been shipped south.

Among his admirers, Ruggles acquired something of a romantic aura as “a General Marion sort of man,” renowned for “sleepless activity, sagacity, and talent,” as one put it, evoking the exploits of a legendary Revolutionary War guerrilla. He boarded incoming ships to see whether slaves were being smuggled in, and boldly pushed his way into homes in fashionable neighborhoods to investigate the status of black domestics whom he suspected might be held in involuntary servitude. “Procuring the escape of a slave from bondage to liberty is a violation of no law of the land,” he declared. “I may, I
must,
suffer the laws of the government under which I live, but I must not
obey
them if they are contrary to the laws of God…I would show, clearly, by the example of Paul and other Apostles, that wicked and unjust laws
must
be
resisted
even unto
death
.”

In June 1838 Ruggles reported in detail how he had entered the house of D. K. Dodge, a slaveholder from South Carolina who maintained a home on Henry Street, in Brooklyn Heights, where he kept three slaves, one of them for four years, far longer than the nine months permitted to out-of-state slave owners by New York law. At least one of the slaves, a maidservant named Charity, had made contact with the Vigilance Committee and asked for help. Once admitted to the Dodge house, Ruggles simply refused to leave. Dodge's wife maintained that they had brought the slaves north specifically to set them free.

“Haven't I told you that you are free?” she asked Charity.

“You told me to
say so
if anybody ask me,” Charity replied, emboldened by Ruggles's presence, “but you beat me here as much as ever, missee.”

“Why, if Mrs. Dodge brought you here to be free, she would not treat you ill; but on the contrary, she would be kind to you and pay you wages,” said Ruggles.

“Wages!” exclaimed Charity.

“Oh, no,” said Dodge. “But I take good care of you.”

At this point a neighbor, a Dr. McClennan, “a little fellow with a pair of stiff whiskers,” suddenly appeared, apparently intending to evict Ruggles, whom he charged with being an intruder. Ruggles retorted that it was the doctor who was the true intruder, with no right to interfere “against liberty and the laws of the state.”

“I am here to remove a disorderly person,” McClennan declared.

“Find such a person here, and I will aid you in his removal,” replied Ruggles. “I was invited here to relieve humanity.”

“I wish you would
leave
, sir,” McClennan repeated.

“I wish
you
would leave, sir,” said Ruggles.

“You aggravate me,” said the doctor.

“You don't aggravate me,” replied Ruggles.

The doctor, looking over and under his spectacles, as though getting ready to use his rattan cane, visibly came to the conclusion, Ruggles supposed, that since the abolitionist was some inches taller and heavier, he would not attempt it. After further irritable debate over the consequences of bringing slaves into New York, the doctor at last begged Ruggles to wait until the man of the house returned before attempting to “carry off” any of the slaves.

“They are perfectly free to do as they please,” said Ruggles blandly. “If they choose to remain, they can; I employ no force to remove them; if they go with me, I will protect them.”

“I is free as a rat, and am going,” Charity proclaimed. “If I was to stop here I should find myself dead tomorrow morning. I know you, missee.”

Concluded Ruggles, “As I was then ready to leave, Charity took a bundle of rags, which were an apology for clothes, and with the editor, left her kind and affectionate mistress to take care of herself, and is now doing well.”

The postscript to this story was not a happy one, and it grimly underscores the extreme precariousness of existence for the city's black poor. The Vigilance Committee found Charity a place to live, but she slipped into prostitution, became pregnant, and was abandoned by the father of the child. The committee finally washed its hands of her, and she returned to Brooklyn, where she begged support from the Dodge family. However, they never employed her again.

During the Vigilance Committee's first year of operation, Ruggles and his associates protected and gave aid to 335 men and women. But
their tactics did not go unremarked. Proslavery newspapers viciously attacked him as a “sooty scoundrel” and as “the official ourang outang of the Anti-Slavery Society.” More than once he was thrown into prison as an accessory to a case. An attempt to kidnap Ruggles himself was made in the early morning of December 28, 1835, when several notorious slave catchers, including two New York constables and a sailor from a suspected Portuguese slave ship, invaded his home as he made a hasty exit through the back door. The next morning Ruggles went to a city magistrate to complain, but he was seized and jailed by a constable named Boudinot, who had previously posed as an abolitionist to spy on the committee's activities. Boudinot, it turned out, held an open warrant empowering him to arrest any black person claimed by a certain Georgia slave catcher who was then active in New York. Ruggles gained his release, but he remained convinced that the slave catchers' plan had been to ship him south on the Portuguese brig.

Ruggles's aggressive leadership made the New York committee a model for vigilance committees in other cities, most notably Philadelphia. The Philadelphia committee, founded in August 1837, under the leadership of the prominent dentist James McCrummel (who had hosted William Lloyd Garrison in 1833), and Robert Purvis, a wealthy Charleston-born mulatto, was soon handling about one hundred fugitives a year. Among them was James Lindsey Smith, a lame eighteen-year-old shoemaker, whose experience offers an unusually detailed picture of how the underground operated. Smith, with two friends Lorenzo and Zip, stole a boat on the Cone River in Virginia and sailed as far as they could up Chesapeake Bay, then abandoned the boat and set off on foot in the direction of Pennsylvania. Smith's physical limitation slowed down the others, and they left him behind, in tears. Later that night, Smith was almost run over and killed by the first train that he had ever seen. (He was sure that it was some demonic creature transporting souls to hell, but felt heartened when he noticed that its only passengers were white people.) In despair, he was about to give himself up to the local authorities, when he reminded himself that he had already traveled 250 miles, and could at least try to go a little farther. It was a lucky decision. Reaching New Castle, Delaware, he ran into Lorenzo and Zip again, and the three of them boarded a ship bound for Philadelphia, nonplussed at their luck in succeeding in buying tickets without being questioned. Once in Philadelphia, Lorenzo and Zip
took ship for Europe, leaving Smith to wander the streets looking for work. Confused and again despairing, he approached a black minister and asked for lodging for the night, but the man curtly refused, telling him to go to a tavern. Almost as an afterthought, the minister asked him if he was free. “Here I was in a great dilemma, not knowing what to do or say,” Smith wrote. “He told me that if I was a fugitive I would find friends. I told him frankly that I was from the South and that I was a runaway.” After interrogating Smith briefly, the minister arranged for Smith to stay with a black cobbler who was apparently a member of the underground. “After giving me a good supper, they secreted me in a little room called the fugitive's room, to sleep.” The following day, the fifth after Smith had left Virginia, he was handed over to a group of abolitionists, including white Quakers, who decided on the spot, without explanation, to send him to Springfield, Massachusetts. The next morning, the cobbler took Smith to the dock and placed him on a steamboat for New York, with a letter addressed to David Ruggles. Ruggles then personally put him on a steamer for Hartford, Connecticut. Left to his own devices and having been given no pocket money, Smith slept on the deck amid heaps of cotton bales, and was fed only thanks to a waiter who took pity on him. At Hartford, he was met on the dock by an African American, who had been notified ahead of time by Ruggles. This man took Smith to his own house and introduced him to local abolitionists, from whom he solicited contributions (a total of three dollars) to send him on up the Connecticut River valley to Springfield.

Other fugitives, probably the majority, were forwarded to abolitionist settlements in upstate New York, or to Canada. By the late 1830s, many of these were dispatched by steamboat from New York City up the Hudson River to Albany or Troy, a ten-hour trip. From there they might be forwarded either via the Erie Canal to Oswego, or farther west to Rochester or Buffalo, and on to Canada. With luck, a fugitive could expect to be in Canada within a week after leaving the dock at the foot of Barclay Street, in Manhattan. Some fugitives traveled the much slower land route through the chain of Quaker farming communities along the eastern edge of New York state, either settling somewhere along the way, or continuing on ultimately to Vermont. In November 1838 Charles Marriott, a gentleman farmer and close friend of Isaac Hopper, wrote matter-of-factly from his home near the small city of Hudson to their mutual friend Rowland T.
Robinson, in Vermont: “Many fugitives from the South effect their escape. 3 passed through my hands last week.”

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It is often unclear why the underground chose to send fugitives by certain routes, or to particular destinations. Sometimes destinations were selected in accordance with the fugitives' own preferences, and other times on the basis of the forwarding agent's own biases, or the availability of work. Oliver Johnson, whose connections were mainly in New England, for instance, sent “Simon” all the way to Vermont because he knew that Rowland T. Robinson would give him work, and because he feared that he would sink into indolence in Canada; “Simon” would have been spared an arduous overland trek had Burleigh passed him on to abolitionists in nearby Ohio. Fugitives with experience in the maritime trades were often sent to the whaling port and abolitionist stronghold of New Bedford, Massachusetts. One of them was an intense, well-built young man with an exceptionally penetrating gaze, named Frederick Bailey, who appeared at David Ruggles's door in September 1838. Of the thousand or so persons whom Ruggles helped during his three-year tenure, none had anywhere near as much impact on history as the frightened and bedraggled Bailey, who had spent his few previous days of freedom as a vagabond on the streets of Manhattan.