Abstract
David Ruggles has long remained little known to most students of antebellum America other than for the role he played in 1838 in helping fugitive slave Frederick Douglass escape from New York to safety in Massachusetts. Graham Russell Gao Hodges's biography of Ruggles will go a long way toward making Americans aware of this long-neglected reformer. He was in fact a significant black abolitionist who helped as many as 600 former slaves to freedom. As the founder of the New York Committee of Vigilance, he practiced direct confrontation with slaveholders and their many northern allies. He thus assured the safety of free blacks who might be kidnapped into slavery and of fugitives escaping from slavery. He led the fight against the racist attitudes and actions of white New Yorkers. Yet in describing Ruggles's life, Hodges may be guilty of too much speculation and of claiming too much for his subject.
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