Bound for Canaan

by Fergus Bordewich

  New York’s prosperity was wedded to the South. The city formed the hinge of the so-called Cotton Triangle. New York ships carried consignments of cotton from New Orleans, Mobile, and Charleston to Liverpool, in England, and the French port of LeHavre, returned to New York with cargoes of manufactured goods, and then worked their way southward along the eastern seaboard, selling their goods and buying more cotton. (At least one-fourth of the cotton reaching Liverpool from the United States came through the East River waterfront.) In addition, hundreds of coastal trading ships brought Southern cargoes directly to New York, where the city’s expanse of wharves and warehouses facilitated the transshipment of cotton directly to European mills, in the process enriching local middlemen, shipowners, insurers, and warehousemen. Southern planters, having virtually no commercial banks in their own region, depended grudgingly on New York agents to convert their profits from cotton into cash, and to speculate on their behalf in other commodities on the New York market; up to forty cents of every dollar paid for Southern cotton wound up in the hands of New York merchants. Many wealthy Southerners also kept second homes in New York, or vacationed in the city’s luxurious hotels. When they came, they brought their black servants with them, knowing that New York law allowed them to maintain their slaves in the state for up to nine months, and confident that the city’s accommodating magistrates would not trouble them unduly if they over-stayed the deadline.

  Racism was virulent. New York state’s constitution unfairly applied property qualifications to disqualify all but a handful of black voters. African Americans were almost completely excluded from colleges and public schools, and segregated in theaters, eating places, and accommodations. They were compelled to cling to the outsides of the omnibuses that traveled the city’s avenues and barred from going indoors on the steamboats that plied the city’s waters. Even menial professions were hard for them to break into. When William S. Hewlett sought a cartman’s license in 1836, the mayor turned him down, despite his having provided forty character references, “on the grounds of public opinion.” Some people trained their parrots to curse every black who passed.

  The city’s political culture was also friendly to slavery. Slave hunters openly advertised their services in the newspapers. F. H. Pettis, a Virginian practicing law in New York, placed an ad—its title in bold caps: “IMPORTANT TO THE SOUTH”—announcing “to his friends and the public in general, that he has been engaged as Counsel and Adviser in General for a party whose business it is in the northern cities to arrest and secure runaway slaves. He has thus been engaged for several years, and as the act of Congress alone governs now in this city, in business of this sort, which renders it easy for the recovery of such property, he invites, post paid, communications to him, enclosing a fee of $20 in each case, and a power of Attorney minutely descriptive of the party absconded, and if in the northern region, he or she will soon be had. NB. New York City is estimated to contain 5,000 Runaway Slaves.”

  Fugitives were at the mercy of an informal and shifting ring that was known to abolitionists as the “New York Kidnapping Club.” It included professional slave hunters, city constables, local lawyers, and allegedly the city recorder, Richard Riker, a power in the Democratic Party, and a former slave owner, who had declared that emancipation was a curse rather than a blessing for blacks, blaming it for the “prevalence of crime among free people of color.” In practice, it was usually necessary for a man claiming to be the slave’s owner only to appear before a magistrate and submit an affidavit in order to be permitted to take the slave back to his home state. It was not an uncommon sight for recaptured slaves to be seen being marched down Broadway in chains to a waiting steamer bound for the South. Seven-year-old Henry Scott, for instance, was physically snatched from his classroom by a city policeman and a Virginia planter who claimed him as his slave. Peter Martin, a fugitive who had lived in New York for four years, was assaulted by police and, when he tried to defend himself, clubbed to the ground and savagely beaten by a mob who came to the aid of the police. Francis Smith, a waiter, was preparing to leave for New Haven to be married when he was caught by slave hunters. Smith’s fiancée tried to purchase his freedom, without success. After months in jail, he was sent back to slavery in Virginia. Other fugitives were jailed on trumped-up criminal charges, and then deported to the South before their lawyers were informed of what happened.

  Most of the city’s fifteen thousand or so black inhabitants lived packed alongside immigrant Irish around the Five Points, so named because of the five narrow streets that intersected there. For most of the nineteenth century, the area was a national by-word for squalor and mayhem, described by the New York Mirror, in one typical report, as a “loathsome den of murderers, thieves, abandoned women, ruined children, filth, drunkenness, and broils [brawls].” George Catlin, an artist best known for his portraits of Indians on the Great Plains, painted the Five Points, depicting a riotous scene of battling drunks, leering prostitutes, and intermingled races, which to most Americans of the time by itself suggested unspeakable wickedness and sin. Tenements had names such as “The Gates of Hell” and “Brickbat Mansion”; the most notorious of all was an abandoned brewery where as many as one thousand of the poorest Irish and African Americans lived crammed together, prostitutes plied their trade openly, and the dead were often interred beneath the basement’s earthen floor. Everywhere in the neighborhood, lanes ran thick with a soup of rotting garbage and human waste, and pigs and other animals foraged in the fetid byways. “Saturate your handkerchief with camphor, so that you can endure the horrid stench,” visitors to the area were advised by a Temperance worker.

  Fueled by poverty, ethnic rivalries, and social dislocation, violence slithered restlessly through the city’s life, without pattern or remedy. Mob violence was endemic. Only some of it was racial. White gangs like the Bowery Boys, the True Blue Americans, and the Atlantic Guards waged street battles over turf. Elections were an extension of street warfare, with hired gangsters blackjacking their opponents and serving as repeat voters at the polls. In 1833 the homes of prominent abolitionists were attacked by stone-throwing gangs, and on July 4 of the following year, mobs provoked by Democratic politicians and Southern sympathizers laid siege to the Chatham Street Chapel, a popular site for abolitionist meetings. The rioters then moved to City Hall Park, reported the Sun, “to act out their patriotism in knocking down the blacks.” In the days that followed, mobs ranged through the Five Points, terrorizing African Americans, burning down black churches, groceries, and saloons, and sacking brothels. The violence was not limited to blacks, however: an Englishman who was caught had his eyes gouged out and both ears torn off by the rioters.

  In November 1835 a mostly African-American group calling itself the Friends of Human Rights met “to ascertain, if possible, the extent to which the cruel practice of kidnaping men, women, and children is carried on in this city.” The result was the formation of the Vigilance Committee of New York, the first organized effort on the part of African Americans to defend themselves against the city’s racial lawlessness. David Ruggles was selected to serve as secretary, the committee’s executive officer. He was already well-known among the city’s small community of politically active African Americans. In 1833 he had called for “a union amongst our people without regard to sects or sectarian principles and one that will encourage schools for children and foster the arts and sciences.” Convinced that “moral virtue” could only be acquired by observation, reading, and reflection, he opened a bookshop in his home on Lispenard Street, where he circulated antislavery publications and did job printing. When the bookstore was damaged by arsonists, unfazed, he opened a reading room for young blacks, who were excluded from the city’s cultural institutions. Without “some centre of literary attraction for all young men whose mental appetites thirst for food,” he warned, “many are in danger of being led into idle and licentious habits by the allurements of vice which surround them on every side.” Some of his views pointed toward the
black nationalism of the future. He envisioned racial separation by mutual consent, approvingly citing the example of the Jews, who were “standing proof that nations and people can live together in the same country, enjoy the same political and domestic equality, and never intermarry.” When colonizationists accused the abolition movement of promoting racial “amalgamation” that would turn the nation into one of “mulattoes and mongrels,” Ruggles retorted, “Amalgamation of the races! Now I for one detest the idea of amalgamation. I do not wish it, nor does any colored man or woman of my acquaintance, nor can instances be adduced where a desire was manifested by any colored person; but I deny that ‘intermarriages’ between the ‘whites and blacks are unnatural.’”

  Under Ruggles’s leadership, the Vigilance Committee publicized descriptions of missing people, raised money for fugitives, hiring lawyers for them when necessary, and took legal action against ships’ captains who trafficked in slaves. The committee also became the hinge upon which the Underground Railroad’s operations turned in New York, with links that extended southward to Philadelphia, and north to central New York state, New England, and Canada. The needy came in many guises. Some were fleeing areas where laws had been enacted against free blacks, others were kidnap victims found aboard ships in New York harbor, and others were free persons abducted by kidnappers and sold into the cotton states. The committee also helped those recently arrived from the South who desperately needed immediate food, shelter, and transportation north. All this, Ruggles undertook to provide. “This business was almost wholly neglected previous to the organization of this committee,” he wrote in the Emancipator. This, he added, was “practical abolition.”

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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 characterized 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.
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  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.