David Ruggles’s father had been a respected blacksmith, and his mother was a cook at a local tavern near Norwich and a caterer. Both taught their son the skills needed for a businessman. The Ruggles family attended the local Congregational Church, which was an integrated congregation where Blacks were not confined to the back rows. David Ruggles, born in 1810, was fortunate that a local religious school for poor children began admitting Blacks in 1815, allowing him to learn to read.
In 1838, enslaved Frederick Bailey escaped from Baltimore and arrived a soon thereafter in New York. A Black sailor he met on the docks advised him to go to 36 Lispenard Street about halfway across the island of Manhattan. This was the home and business of David Ruggles, the Secretary of the Committee of Vigilance. The secretive group was formed to counter the Kidnapping Club of slavecatchers who abducted free New York Blacks to sell down South. Ruggles was the leader of the group and he expanded its activities to include sheltering runaway enslaved people. He would walk the docks looking for fugitive slaves and get escaped slaves referred to him for help. He also built networks with anti-slavery clandestine networks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania who would send him escapees, and with similar groups in Upstate New York who could help those he assisted travel on to Canada. Fred Bailey had been directed to the most influential Underground Railroad conductor in New York City.
When Bailey entered this house in 1838, Ruggles immediately understood his situation and advised that his first step towards freedom was to change his name. Instead of Frederick Bailey, he would now be Frederick Douglass. Ruggles wrote to the woman Douglass said he loved, Anna Murray, and told her to come to New York immediately. She did, and she and Frederick were married in this building. While Douglass felt safe in New York, Ruggles knew that both Southern slavecatchers and corrupt New York police conspired to abduct Blacks back into slavery. Ruggles gave Douglass the equivalent of a week’s wages and directed him to travel on to New Bedford where he could find shelter with another link in the Underground Railroad. It is unlikely that either Ruggles or Douglass called this the Underground Railroad in 1838. The term was apparently a later invention. But when Douglass later wrote about his escape from slavery he called Ruggles an “officer of the underground railroad.” By 1839, the term appeared in print for the first time.
Ruggles published his own newspaper The Mirror of Liberty, becoming an outstanding figure against slavery. Unlike Norwich where he was from, many New Yorkers did not share his Abolitionist views. While Ruggles stood up against slavery, influential merchants and financiers tied into the cotton market often promoted Southern slaveholder interests and the city’s Democratic machine opposed Abolitionism.
When I stood outside this old, neat building in Tribeca, I could not help but think of how privileged I was to stand on ground trod by Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray at the home of a heroic champion of freedom. While some guides describe the building as the actual home of David Ruggles, sources from the 1830s describe his home as a three story brick building and the current building is five stories. It appears to have been built, or modified, later.
Sources:
David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City by Graham Russell Gao Hodges pub. University of North Carolina Press (2010)
The Kidnapping Club by Jonathan Daniel Welles pub. Hachette Press
Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad by Eric Foner Pub. Norton (2015)
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