Born in the Jail Hill section of Norwich in 1810, David Ruggles was raised in a neighborhood on Bean Hill by his father David, a blacksmith and his mother Nancy, a caterer. Sharply intelligent as a youth, he honed his scholarly skills at the city’s religious charity schools for African Americans. Independent by nature, he moved to New York City at age sixteen and found work in the maritime trade. A few years later having earned enough money, he opened a combination grocery store and bookshop promoting anti-slavery literature. In 1833 he became an agent for the abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator.
His business became a popular venue with the city’s 16,000 black residents, many of whom had been attracted to the city when New York officially ended slavery in the state by legislative decree in 1827. Ruggles subscribed to what he termed “practical abolitionism”. In service to that approach he aggressively monitored the city’s docks, identifying ships and their captains who were surreptitiously involved with the slave trade and reporting them to the local authorities. He was equally bold about confronting wealthy white persons who defied the law and secretively maintained black servants as slaves in their households.
In 1835 Ruggles and other black abolitionists founded the New York Committee of Vigilance in response to Southern agents and local independent contractors kidnapping black persons on the streets and re-enslaving them. Kidnapped victims would appear before a notorious local judge, who would without evidence quickly rule them as “escaped slaves” to be returned to their Southern owners by ship. This whole process might take only a few hours.
Ruggles was also active as a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad, assisting blacks escaping slavery and heading north to freedom. He has been credited with assisting over 600 former slaves including Fredrick Douglass in 1838. Douglass stayed briefly in his home in New York City en route to Massachusetts. Ruggle’s stature as a prolific journalist had already been established, when he became the first black publisher of a magazine, the Mirror of Liberty which was issued intermittently from 1838 to 1841.
By 1841 the constant stress of his nonstop activism began to take its toll on Ruggle’s health. Serious health issues including his rapidly declining eyesight as well as his growing financial difficulties forced him to leave New York City. He accepted an invitation to join an experimental health commune in North Hampton, Massachusetts in an effort to recover his health. As his health slowly improved, he recovered enough of his vitality to occasionally write articles for a variety of abolitionist publications. Unfortunately, he was never again completely healthy, and he eventually died of a severe bowel infection on December 18, 1849. His family reclaimed his body and buried David Ruggles in the family plot in the Yantic Cemetery.
To read one of David Ruggle’s most eloquent abolitionist pamphlets of “Extinguisher Extinguished”, visit the Otis Library’s Flickr site of historical photographs.