Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (11 page)

Another case that attracted considerable attention originated when John McPherson, a Maryland slaveowner, encountered Henry Metscher on a New York street in October 1837 and claimed that he was Nat, who had escaped four years earlier. Nash and Boudinot arrested Metscher on the pretext of having committed an assault. Perhaps mindful of the near riot a few months earlier, three judges declined to hear the case, but McPherson finally located one who examined documents from Maryland indicating that a slave named Nat owned by McPherson had run away in 1833. The judge ruled that Metscher was the same individual, which he strenuously denied. Dresser presented evidence that Metscher had lived in New Jersey before Nat’s escape, and asked for permission to present witnesses affirming this, but the judge ordered Metscher sent to Maryland. Nash and Boudinot removed him from the city. All these cases intensified demands, which extended well beyond the abolitionist movement, for the state to allow a jury, not a single official, to determine the status of an accused fugitive. “It is a momentous question,” declared the
New
York
Evening
Post
, “whether the liberty of a man can be decided by any other tribunal than . . . a jury.”
16

As these and other cases involving the Committee of Vigilance demonstrate, once authorities brought an individual to court as an alleged fugitive, he was almost certain to be remanded to slavery. As a result, Ruggles devoted considerable effort to helping fugitives avoid apprehension. The committee’s clandestine assistance to fugitive slaves is much more difficult to document than its highly visible public and legal actions. In the 1830s, the committee’s reports offered long accounts of kidnapping cases but no specifics about aid to fugitives. It is clear, however, that Ruggles’s home became a destination for many runaway slaves, whom he dispatched to upstate New York or New England, often to the homes of abolitionists he had encountered during his days as traveling agent for the antislavery press.

In addition to Frederick Douglass, a few other fugitives recorded their experiences with Ruggles. William Green escaped from Maryland to New York, and a friend directed him to Ruggles. “He was very active in procuring material aid for and in giving us good advice,” Green later wrote. James L. Smith, who absconded from Virginia to Philadelphia in 1838, was sent on to New York City with a letter addressed to Ruggles. After a few days in Ruggles’s home, he departed for Hartford, with an introduction to an abolitionist there. Smith later became a minister and antislavery lecturer in Massachusetts. Operating before the widespread advent of railroads in the Northeast, Ruggles seems to have dispatched most of the fugitives by coastal vessel or Hudson River steamboat. (Before the completion of a rail link in 1851, the latter was the major mode of transportation between New York City and Albany.)
17

Although those who challenged kidnappers and assisted fugitive slaves were rarely prosecuted, anyone involved in such activities exposed himself to danger. In 1838, Ruggles was arrested and “committed to a felon’s dungeon,” having been charged with harboring a criminal and encouraging a slave to escape. This unusual case arose when John P. Darg, a slave trader from New Orleans, arrived in New York, bringing along a slave, Thomas Hughes. Hughes sought refuge at the home of the Quaker abolitionist Isaac T. Hopper. It turned out that before escaping, Hughes had stolen $7,000 from Darg. Hopper and Barney Corse offered to retrieve the money if Darg emancipated Hughes. They proceeded to recover the funds with the assistance of James S. Gibbons of the AASS. Darg then had them all—plus Ruggles, who had nothing to do with these events—indicted for complicity in theft. To delay Ruggles’s release, the court set his bail at $5,000. The case never came to trial, and Hughes, after serving two years in prison for robbery, agreed to return to New Orleans with Darg as a free man, although he later turned up again in New York.
18

Ruggles spoke and acted in a far more confrontational manner than other leaders of the Vigilance Committee and abolitionists more generally. In 1836, when George Jones, a free resident of New York, was arrested, ruled to be a fugitive on the testimony of several notorious kidnappers, and “dragged to slavery,” Ruggles declared that blacks could no longer “depend on the interposition of the Manumission or Anti-Slavery Societies. . . . We must look to our own safety, . . . remembering that ‘self-defence is the first law of nature.’ ” But the ideal of respectability to which many black leaders adhered clashed with the call for direct action. After the attempted rescue of William Dixon, Samuel Cornish published a stern rebuke in the
Colored
American
to the participants in what he called a “disgraceful riot”:

Brethren, my heart is grieved at your conduct yesterday, and on all occasions of fugitive trials. We have an intelligent and efficient Vigilance Committee, who have eminent lawyers in their employ. . . . We have perfect confidence in the men whose business is to conduct these matters. And we must here enter our solemn protest, against your going to the courts at all . . . on the occasion of fugitive trials. . . . You . . . degrade yourselves, and all others in the least connected with you. . . . We ask the pardon and clemency of our municipal authorities, . . . in behalf of the ignorant part of our colored citizens.

Cornish especially reprimanded “those females” who “degraded themselves” by taking part in the altercation. He urged their husbands “to keep them at home.”
19

Cornish was a leading member of the Vigilance Committee. His editorials reveal the gap between the “aristocracy of character” and ordinary black New Yorkers, who, as he noted, frequently gathered in large numbers at fugitive trials, and whose militancy Ruggles’s actions reflected. By the late 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison, whose
Liberator
, published weekly in Boston, had become the major voice of radical abolitionism, was preaching “non-resistance.” This quasi-anarchist philosophy rejected all use of force and all institutions, including governments, that employed it. Many of the committee’s leaders accepted the idea that “moral suasion” was the proper way to combat slavery. In December 1837, at a protest meeting shortly after the return to slavery of Henry Metscher, Ruggles reported a series of resolutions, one of which seemed to countenance violence: “we cannot recommend non-resistance to persons who are denied the protection of equitable law.” A spirited debate followed. Theodore S. Wright, Charles B. Ray, and William P. Johnson, all members of the Vigilance Committee’s executive committee, objected on the grounds that the resolution violated the “peace principles” of the AASS. Ruggles replied “with much warmth” that a person seized by a kidnapper “ought not only to use words implying resistance, but should resist even unto death.” The meeting rejected his resolution.
20

These differences undoubtedly contributed to the final breach between Ruggles and other leaders of the Vigilance Committee. In 1838, the
Colored
American
printed a statement, provided by Ruggles, that John Russell, a black man, had forced three native Africans onto a ship heading to New Orleans. Lawyers brought a libel suit in Russell’s name against the newspaper’s editor, Samuel Cornish; the publisher, Philip A. Bell; and the printer. Russell won a judgment of $600. Cornish insisted that the Vigilance Committee should take responsibility for payment. The committee’s leaders replied that Ruggles had acted alone and bore the responsibility. Ruggles contended that he had written the statement in his capacity as the committee’s secretary. “We have been shamefully used in the libel case, from first to last, by somebody,” Cornish complained. “If we believe the Vigilance Committee by Mr. Ruggles, and if we believe Mr. Ruggles by the Vigilance Committee.”
21

By 1839, Ruggles and the committee leadership were publishing conflicting accounts of these events and holding public meetings to denounce each other. The charges against Ruggles expanded; Cornish, Charles B. Ray, Theodore S. Wright, and others claimed that he had not kept proper financial records and had used Vigilance Committee money for private purposes. Cornish, who had once praised Ruggles effusively, now denounced him for “wilful misrepresentations and base falsehoods.” Lewis Tappan, who along with his brother Arthur had contributed money to help pay the libel judgment, complained that Ruggles, “like most every colored man I have ever known,” kept no regular financial records. Compared to Tappan’s meticulous double-entry bookkeeping, this was undoubtedly correct. “Auditors” appointed by the Vigilance Committee, including Tappan and Horace Dresser, concluded that Ruggles owed the organization $326.17. For his part, Ruggles sued the committee for back wages. The controversy disturbed many abolitionists. The
Emancipator
published statements by both sides but declared, “We have formed no opinion on the merits of the unfortunate dispute.” With his health deteriorating and finances exhausted, Ruggles resigned from the Vigilance Committee in 1839. He tried to revive the
Mirror
of
Liberty
, which had been suspended because of these difficulties, but its final issue appeared in 1841. Most of it was devoted to a long letter by Ruggles accusing Cornish, Wright, Ray, Philip A. Bell, and Lewis Tappan of engaging in a malicious conspiracy against him. He thanked James S. Gibbons and Isaac T. Hopper, among others, for their support. The Vigilance Committee, Ruggles claimed, had “apostatized.”
22

In 1840, Ruggles left New York. The following year, a conductor violently evicted him from a segregated railroad car in New Bedford after he refused to vacate his seat. Ruggles sued the company, but a local judge ruled that corporations enjoyed the right to exclude “vagabonds, wranglers,” and other undesirables, including blacks, from their trains. Even the city known as the fugitive’s Gibraltar evidently harbored racial prejudice. Soon afterward, Ruggles moved to a utopian community in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he established a water-cure medical practice. He died there in 1849. The Vigilance Committee survived the debacle and continued its work.
23

Theodore S. Wright, who headed the Vigilance Committee in the 1840s, observed that in contrast to the highly public activities of abolitionist societies, the organization “deemed it prudent” to keep many of its actions secret. As a result, the committee’s labors often went “unnoticed and almost unknown.” Moreover, most of its work “devolves upon two or three individuals,” who were “quite exhausted” by the “incessant demands on their time.” This problem would plague the committee throughout its existence. Nonetheless, between 1835 and 1840, the period of Ruggles’s leadership, the New York Vigilance Committee could boast of significant accomplishments. In the face of internal dissension, legal setbacks, and chronic funding problems, it claimed to have assisted more than 800 fugitives, “who are now enjoying the blessing of liberty.” Largely composed of black New Yorkers, it had won the support and respect of the nation’s leading white abolitionists. Speakers at its annual and monthly meetings included antislavery luminaries from as far away as Boston, upstate New York, and Canada.
24

Before the advent of the Vigilance Committee, the
Emancipator
noted, the plight of fugitives had been a matter “too little thought of by the professed friends of the colored man.” Many abolitionists, another antislavery newspaper remarked, had been “hesitant or timid” when it came to aiding runaway slaves: “had it not been for the activities of the colored people themselves in this department of labor, . . . it may be doubted whether much would have been accomplished.” But in 1839, the New York State Anti-Slavery Society declared that “the assistance of the fugitive slave, and the defense of those arrested as such, are the . . . duty of abolitionists.” Even the staid Manumission Society regularly donated money to the Vigilance Committee.
25

The committee’s activities had also effected a subtle change in public attitudes. The “tide of public opinion,” the committee declared in 1838, had forced kidnappers to change tactics. They now took victims directly to a judge for a secret hearing to avoid proceedings in open court, where sentiment would be against them. During the governorship of the antislavery Whig William H. Seward, the committee achieved several of its legislative aims. In 1840, new laws mandated a jury trial to determine the fate of alleged fugitives, required the claimant to post a bond to cover court costs in event the jury decided the accused was not a runaway slave, and prohibited local judges from issuing arrest warrants for fugitives. The following year, Seward signed a repeal of the 1817 law allowing slaves to be brought to the state “in transit” for up to nine months. Henceforth, the freedom principle applied in New York: any slave entering the state except a fugitive automatically became free. Soon after the law’s passage, a constable tried to apprehend a Georgia slave who had escaped after being brought by her owner into the city, only to be driven away by an “angry multitude of blacks.” The legislature also authorized the governor to appoint an agent to bring proceedings, at state expense, against kidnappers. And Seward rejected southern requests for the extradition of persons accused of aiding slaves to escape. All these developments increased the difficulty of retrieving fugitives and sent a message that kidnapping would no longer be tolerated. By 1842, the Vigilance Committee reported that the “disgraceful scenes” of kidnapping in the city had “gradually died away.”
26

New York and neighboring Brooklyn, to be sure, remained closely tied to southern slavery, and the new laws were not always enforced. In 1842, Edward Sexton, a fugitive slave from Mobile, was arrested in Brooklyn and brought before a judge without being accorded a jury trial as provided in the law of 1840. He admitted being an escaped slave and was returned to Alabama. Although state law barred local judges from issuing arrest warrants for fugitives, a police officer involved in this case remarked that he “had himself assisted in arresting several negroes under such warrants, who were delivered to the claimants and taken off.” When a recently arrived fugitive slave worshiped openly in a black church, the
Colored
American
warned that it was not “prudent . . . to be so public.”