Bound for Canaan (24 page)

On December 1, 1838, Smith wrote with graceful irony an open letter to newspapers about two guests who had recently enjoyed his hospitality, and in return had exposed their whip-scarred backs to his family and a number of his neighbors: “My Dear Sir, You will be happy to hear, that the two fugitive slaves, to whom in the brotherly love of your heart you gave the use of your horse, and are still making undisturbed progress toward the monarchical land whither republican slaves escape for the enjoyment of liberty. They had eaten their breakfast, and were seated in my wagon, before day-dawn, this morning. Fugitive slaves have before taken my house in their way, but never any, whose lips and persons made so forcible an appeal to my sensibilities and kindled in me so much abhorrence of the hell-concocted system of American slavery.”

1

David Ruggles soared like a meteorite into the boiling human nebula of mid-1830s New York City, flaming red hot with outrage, creating in his own image a model for the Underground Railroad in the urban North, then burning out with a tragic suddenness that has left his name, indeed his very presence, all but forgotten today. A period sketch of Ruggles shows a man with small features, a narrow mustache, his head encased in a massive stovepipe hat, and rather weak, deep-set eyes framed by narrow wire-rimmed glasses, hinting at the threat of blindness that would plague him throughout his life. Ruggles was born to free parents in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1810, the oldest of five children. At seventeen he moved to Manhattan, and at nineteen owned a grocery store—how he acquired the capital for it is not known—specializing in “fresh Goshen butter” which he offered “for sale by the Firkin, Tub, or single Pound,” as well as
superior “Canton and Porto Rico Sugars,” cheese, rum, gin, porter, and cider. In 1833 he gave up his store to become an agent for an antislavery newspaper, the
Emancipator
. Ruggles traveled at least as far as Pennsylvania selling subscriptions, delivering antislavery lectures that “excited the liveliest emotions in every heart,” and making contacts that would prove valuable to the underground. He had been comparatively well educated, probably at a local sabbath school, an experience that had endowed him with a passion for learning and intellectual self-confidence, but that had hardly prepared him for the ruthless racial battlefield of New York.

As recently as the 1810s, New Yorkers had complained that their new city hall, a quarter mile north of Wall Street, lay inconveniently far out of town. Twenty years later, the city had raced far beyond city hall, every year bursting its limits anew, building and rebuilding, tearing down only to build itself up again in a different way. Manhattan's population had swelled from 120,350 in 1820 to 188,613, and by the late 1830s was approaching 300,000. It was still a low city, and along the waterfront, which defined its image for the outer world, the masts of sailing ships stood higher than anything else erected by man. Public services were primitive. There was no restriction on the number of people who could be packed into a single dwelling, no sewage system, and precious little police protection for the law-abiding in a society that seemed to grow more violent by the day. But in the dusty, churning air that stank of sewage, pigs, charcoal, and unwashed bodies, there was also a pervasive sense of opportunity not to be missed, of fast money to be made. The mood could be felt in the quickened pace of the high-stepping horses that pulled the green and red omnibuses, in the impatient cries of the men who sold fresh oysters and the girls who hawked hot corn, the fast foods of the day, in the fizz of the popular theaters that were sprouting along the old country road known as the Bowery, in the architectural pomp of the grand buildings that proclaimed the city's growing sense of power: the spectacular dome of the Mercantile Exchange with its fifteen-foot-high statue of Alexander Hamilton in its grand rotunda, the elegant facade of the New Centre Market, the new city prison, designed to resemble an Egyptian temple and known to all as “The Tombs,” and the colonnaded splendor of city hall, with its confident allusions to imperial power.

The great shaping force of the city's life was its ever-widening commercial orbit. Workshops near the waterfront manufactured everything
from mustard and playing cards, to furniture and locomotives. New canals, the Erie Canal foremost among them, drew commodities of all kinds toward the city from the innermost reaches of the agricultural heartland, and the more distant frontier, while its vast port welcomed both immigrants and ships from every corner of the world. On a single day, no fewer than 921 cargo ships lined the East River waterfront alone, and another 330 lay moored along the bank of the Hudson. The city's shipyards, the most productive in the country in 1833, that year turned out twenty-six ships and barks, seven brigs, thirty-six schooners, and five steamboats. The port also maintained a lucrative trade outfitting ships, including slavers, even though such business was technically barred by federal law. Nearly five hundred commercial houses specialized in foreign trade, and more than twice that number in domestic.

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 pro
voked 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.”