Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (10 page)

In addition to these public and entirely legal pursuits, the Vigilance Committee, as Ruggles announced in a report on the group’s activities in December 1836, “did not scruple to help fugitive slaves to places of safety,” a task, he noted, “almost wholly neglected” before the organization’s formation. Assisting fugitives was “but one branch” of the committee’s work and “not even the major part.” Most of its attention was devoted to kidnapping cases. But in the year since its formation, Ruggles claimed, the committee had “saved” 300 persons “from being carried back into slavery.” At another meeting, William Johnston noted that “multitudes of fugitive slaves” came through the city. Before the formation of the Vigilance Committee, they arrived “friendless, poor, ignorant and unprotected,” and in “nine cases out of ten, they were retaken.” Now, for the first time, organized assistance was available to aid them “in escaping to a land of freedom.” “This,” Ruggles declared, was “practical abolition.”
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Despite the committee’s interracial leadership, most of those who attended its meetings and took part in its activities were black New Yorkers. Kidnapping posed a threat to every black family. The committee’s first annual public meeting, in May 1837, was “crowded to overflowing, mostly with colored people,” but also attracted a “goodly number” of white delegates to the annual gathering of the AASS, which took place simultaneously in the city. Ruggles’s annual report, declared the white abolitionist Henry C. Wright, was “a pamphlet that should go into every house in the land.” It not only exposed the activities of kidnappers but also offered a lengthy account of the numerous forms of inequality to which blacks in New York City were subjected, including the “pro-slavery feeling” that barred them from education, employment, and equal treatment in the courts. The report praised the work of the AASS but suggested that its focus on abolition had led it to neglect “minor evils” (compared to slavery) at home. Invoking Ruggles’s favorite phrase, it urged its readers to act “in every case of oppression and wrong . . . and thus . . . prove ourselves practical abolitionists.”
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The Vigilance Committee quickly established an innovative system to raise funds: an “effective committee” of 100 persons, male and female, each of whom would collect money—as little as a penny a month—from ten or more friends. Among other things, the funds would pay Ruggles’s annual salary of $400 and his expenses as the group’s full-time secretary and general agent. Taken together, the effective committee and its donors represented by far the largest group of New Yorkers engaged in antislavery work in the mid-1830s.
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Throughout its life, however, the Vigilance Committee found itself chronically short of funds. Ruggles published monthly reports of receipts, most of them donations of under one dollar from ordinary black New Yorkers. Black churches and fraternal organizations, such as the Ladies’ Literary Society, also raised money. Indeed, although men dominated the group’s leadership, black women did much of the fund raising—the “ladies,” as Ruggles put it, “who collect from their friends one penny a week.” Members of the executive committee also made donations, including Ruggles himself, who gave fifty dollars in 1837. The largest individual contributions came from prominent white abolitionists, including William Jay, the Tappan brothers, and Gerrit Smith. At the 1837 annual meeting, Johnston acknowledged that the committee’s work had been “cramped and impeded by our poverty. The work demands thousands where we have tens.” A year later, Ruggles reported that in the previous month, twenty-six fugitives had come to the committee’s attention, but because of lack of funds, they could be offered nothing more than “I wish you well, with faint prospects before them.” Nonetheless, in the first decade of its existence, the Vigilance Committee later claimed, it assisted around 2,000 fugitive slaves to gain their freedom.
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Much of the Vigilance Committee’s success in its first few years can be attributed to the indefatigable Ruggles, “the most active man in the city,” one abolitionist newspaper called him. Operating in New York City presented daunting challenges. The committee essentially worked out of Ruggles’s home at 36 Lispenard Street (a building that remains standing today). It found it difficult to locate “a permanent place” for its monthly meetings and generally had to rely on black churches to provide space. Nonetheless, early in 1838 Ruggles issued a report on no fewer than 173 cases he had dealt with since the committee’s founding, including investigations and assistance to kidnap victims and fugitive slaves.
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Ruggles boarded incoming ships looking for slaves. In one instance, he and other committee members rescued three Africans illegally brought into the port. He introduced them at a Vigilance Committee meeting, noting that more Africans had been shipped to New York by illegal slave traders in the previous year than the Colonization Society had “succeeded in exporting from this state to Africa.” The slave traders against whom Ruggles brought charges included Nathaniel Gordon, who in 1862 would become the only American executed for participation in the slave trade from Africa. In 1838, Ruggles alerted the district attorney to Gordon’s crimes, and a judge ordered him held on $5,000 bail. But a grand jury refused to issue an indictment.
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In 1838, Ruggles learned that two years earlier, a South Carolina family had brought three slaves to work in their summer home in Brooklyn. Ruggles entered the home and confronted the owner, explaining New York law and the time limit on slave transit: “They are as free as I am; after remaining here nine months, they have a right to demand wages for every hour’s service they have performed.” Ruggles refused to leave when ordered to do so, and eventually departed with one of the slaves; the other two evidently remained in slavery. The press reported the incident, one newspaper calling Ruggles “an insolent black fellow.” In 1838, a free black New Yorker informed Ruggles that the captain of a coastal vessel had tricked his son and two other black sailors into leaving their ship in New Orleans, where they were sold into slavery. Ruggles gathered evidence from other sailors and secured the captain’s arrest. The committee succeeded in persuading the purchaser in the South to send the three home.
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Apart from all this, Ruggles was constantly writing, producing his own antislavery and anti-colonization tracts and publicizing the Vigilance Committee’s monthly meetings in the
Emancipator
,
Colored
American
, and his own periodical, the
Mirror
of
Liberty
. The first magazine edited by a black American, the
Mirror
published five issues between 1838 and 1841. In 1838, Ruggles established a reading room where New Yorkers who paid a small annual fee could “have access to the principal daily and leading anti-slavery papers.” He filled the antislavery press, black and white, with notices warning about the practices of the kidnappers who “infested” the city—some of whom he identified by name—and offering detailed descriptions of their victims. The notices bore an eerie resemblance to fugitive slave ads. One read:

Francis Maria Shields, a girl of about 12 years of age, is missed by her guardians and acquaintances. . . . She is middling size, dark brown complexion, short hair, with a scar over her right eyebrow. Her dress was a purple and white frock, white straw hat, lined with pink, and trimmed with straw colored ribbon, mixed stockings, and boots. Any person who will give such information as will lead to the restoration of said girl to her guardian and friends, shall be rewarded.
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Ruggles and the committee enlisted a group of antislavery lawyers to take cases of kidnapping to court and to contest the rendition of alleged fugitives. This was not an easy task in a city where many public officials openly sympathized with slaveholders and some connived in kidnapping. A speaker at one of the committee’s public meetings in 1838 denounced “the pusillanimous and disgraceful conduct” of judges, district attorneys, and other officials in kidnapping cases. Despite federal statutes outlawing the Atlantic slave trade, New York City judges treated foreign ships entering the harbor as if they were from the South, enjoying the right to bring slaves for the transit period of up to nine months. In 1838, Ruggles attempted to secure a writ of habeas corpus for a young “apprentice” (a temporary status of recently freed West Indian slaves) who had been brought on a ship to New York and was in danger of being transported to South Carolina to be sold. Two judges refused to hear the plea, one claiming illness, the second “as he wanted his dinner.” By the time a third judge agreed to issue the writ, the ship and youth had departed. Meanwhile, Recorder Richard Riker and his Kidnapping Club continued their notorious activities. In March 1837, John Price, who had lived in the city for several years with his wife, was arrested by Tobias Boudinot, taken to Riker, and after a summary hearing remanded to a Maryland slaveowner who claimed him as a fugitive. That December, Riker sent to slavery Alfred Canada, charged with being a fugitive from North Carolina, without allowing him the opportunity to have a lawyer or introduce witnesses.
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Horace Dresser, the Vigilance Committee’s leading attorney, argued most of the cases before the recorder. A graduate of Union College, Dresser later became famous as the author of works on legal and historical subjects, including
Battle
Record
of
the
American
Rebellion
as well as a manual of tax law. When he died in 1877, the
New
York
Times
recalled that “at a time when it was exceedingly unpopular,” Dresser had been “the very first lawyer to plead the cause of the slave in the New York courts”—an exaggeration, given the earlier efforts of the Manumission Society. In the 1830s, however, Dresser was indeed “called upon in all slave cases,” as the
Colored
American
put it. His “services are abundant,” it added, but his “remuneration is comparatively nothing at all.” Against formidable odds, Dresser occasionally won a legal victory. He was able to obtain writs of habeas corpus to bring to court and liberate individuals held in captivity by kidnappers. Generally, however, there was little Dresser or his associate Robert Sedgwick could do, given the attitude of local officials and the duty to return fugitives established in federal and state law. In one instance, Dresser learned that an alleged runaway was about to be taken before the recorder. He rushed to the office only to see Riker rule in favor of the claimant and remark, “I am glad the man has got his nigger again.”
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With the legal obligation to return fugitives clear, Dresser’s arguments generally revolved around identification—was the accused actually the person referred to orally by the alleged owner and his witnesses or in a document from a slave state? In 1836, Abraham Goslee, who claimed to be a free man from Maryland but was charged with being a slave who had escaped the previous year, was brought before the recorder. Sedgwick presented three black witnesses who stated that they had known Goslee in the city before the date of his supposed escape, as well as an affidavit from the clerk of Somerset County Court in Maryland affirming Goslee’s free status. Nonetheless, Riker pronounced Goslee a slave and ordered him dispatched to Maryland. The police arrested four black men after the hearing for loudly calling for Goslee to be rescued.
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A case that produced “tremendous excitement,” and success for the committee, involved thirty-year-old William Dixon, arrested in April 1837 by the kidnappers Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash and a policeman from Baltimore. Dixon was brought before Recorder Riker and charged with being Jake, a slave who had absconded from Walter P. Allender in 1832. Dixon, who earned his living as a whitewasher, denied being Allender’s slave or ever having lived in Baltimore. The case lasted, on and off, for four months while both sides rounded up witnesses. Allender brought over a dozen persons from Baltimore who identified Dixon as his slave. Horace Dresser produced several witnesses, white and black, who testified that Dixon had lived in New York and Boston well before 1832. The
New
-
York
Commercial
Advertiser
, a newspaper not known for sympathy with abolitionists, pronounced the testimony of Dixon’s witnesses “very strong in his favor.” Some of the witnesses perjured themselves, for Dixon was indeed the fugitive Jake.
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Continuing a pattern that would persist until the Civil War whenever an alleged fugitive appeared before a judge, large crowds of black New Yorkers, estimated by various newspapers at from several hundred to nearly 2,000, gathered at the courthouse in lower Manhattan during the proceedings. Hundreds of blacks who could not gain admission paraded on Broadway, wearing hats bedecked with mottos such as “No Slavery” and “Down with Kidnapping.” At one point, after the recorder decided to send Dixon south, “a rush was made instantly from all quarters.” The crowd seized Dixon and hurried him away, but the police soon recaptured him. During the affray, Judge John M. Bloodgood arrived on the scene. Bloodgood remarked that had he known in advance of the riot, he would have “brought his percussion caps with him,” as he “would have liked to have sent a few of those damn niggers to hell.”
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The Vigilance Committee appealed Riker’s order to the New York Supreme Court by filing a writ de homine replegiando, seeking a jury trial, and when denied, the committee appealed to the state’s highest tribunal, the Court for the Trial of Impeachments and the Correction of Errors. On both sides, costs mounted. Allender, according to the
Mirror
of
Liberty
, expended $1,500 on the case and became “quite fatigued with the trouble and expense.” The Vigilance Committee spent $700 and Dixon himself incurred “heavy liabilities . . . in defending his liberty.” The case never reached a final judgment. Dixon was released on bail and left for Canada. Allender, probably worn out by the time-consuming and expensive proceedings, returned to Maryland. Dixon soon reappeared in New York and continued to enjoy his freedom. In May 1838, he addressed the committee’s second anniversary meeting. Five months later, when Frederick Douglass arrived in New York from Maryland, he encountered Dixon, whom he knew as “Allender’s Jake,” on the streets. Dixon warned him of the danger of recapture and told him to leave the city. Oddly, if Douglass’s recollection is correct, Dixon did not mention that Douglass might receive help from the Vigilance Committee. Fortunately for Douglass, another individual directed him to David Ruggles.
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