KOLUMN Magazine
Before Douglass Spoke, Ruggles Opened the Door
When David Ruggles opened his bookshop and reading room in lower Manhattan in 1834, he was 24 years old and already tired of compromise.
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The overlooked abolitionist whose bookstore sheltered escapees from slavery and helped rewrite the politics of a slaveholding republic.
David Ruggles opened the door before the man on the stoop could knock twice.
It was 1838, and the fugitive from Maryland who called himself Frederick Washington Bailey had spent the night on a New York wharf, clutching borrowed papers and the last, fragile belief that freedom might be real. Ruggles—thin, bespectacled, already weary beyond his 20s—ushered him inside the cramped boardinghouse that doubled as his bookstore and office. Books lined the walls; abolitionist pamphlets littered the table. Somewhere in the back, a kettle hissed.
Within days, Ruggles would arrange safe passage for Bailey and send for his fiancée, Anna Murray. In September, in this same house at the corner of Church and Lispenard Streets, the couple would marry and Bailey would take a new name: Frederick Douglass. Years later, Douglass would remember the man who hid him and plotted his route north as “more than a match for his enemies,” a one-man nerve center of the Underground Railroad in New York City.
And at the heart of that operation was something deceptively ordinary: a bookstore.
The First Black Bookstore in a Slave Republic
When David Ruggles opened his bookshop and reading room in lower Manhattan in 1834, he was 24 years old and already tired of compromise.
Born free in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1810 to a blacksmith father and a caterer mother, Ruggles grew up in a tight-knit Black Methodist community, attending charity schools and Sabbath lessons that gave him fluency with scripture and print. At sixteen he headed to New York City, working as a sailor and then opening a small grocery. For a time he sold liquor; soon he embraced temperance, and with it a sharper sense of moral absolutes. The grocery quietly morphed into something else: a node in a growing abolitionist network.
By the early 1830s, Ruggles was traveling as an agent for two of the most radical papers in the country, The Emancipator and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, canvassing for subscribers while filling his own shelves with anti-slavery tracts. In 1834 he made it official, opening what is widely recognized as the first African-American-owned bookstore in the United States—a narrow shop near St. John’s Park, in what is now Tribeca.
He stocked it with the literary equivalent of contraband: abolitionist pamphlets, Black-authored sermons, feminist essays, and speeches by free Black leaders. Among the titles were works by Maria Stewart, the pioneering Black woman orator who linked women’s rights to abolition, and Ruggles’s own pamphlets, including The Extinguisher and The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment, which urged Northern women to confront husbands who kept enslaved Black women as sexual property.
Across the Atlantic, bookshops were already understood as political spaces, but in New York—a city whose merchants and bankers grew rich off slave-grown cotton—the idea of a Black man selling antislavery literature was incendiary. Local newspapers dubbed his cramped shop an “incendiary depot.” Mobs took note.
In September 1835, as anti-abolitionist riots spread through the city, a white mob torched Ruggles’s store. But fire was a blunt tool against a man who had built his life around paper. He reopened, this time leaning even harder into activism, turning his bookstore and nearby home at 36 Lispenard Street into what one historian calls “the most welcoming Underground Railroad depot in the city.”
A Bookstore That Was Also a Border Crossing
To imagine Ruggles’s shop as merely a retail space is to miss the point. It functioned more like a newsroom crossed with a safe house—a place where news was printed, fugitives were fed and housed, and strategy sessions ran late into the night.
The front room held books, pamphlets and broadsides stacked in loosely organized piles: tracts against the American Colonization Society, sermons denouncing slavery, accounts of Black life in the North, and reports on kidnappings and court cases. Ruggles’s printing press clattered in the back, churning out handbills and, eventually, The Mirror of Liberty, one of the earliest magazines edited and published by an African American.
Drawn by the smell of ink and the stir of argument, the city’s small but vocal abolitionist community—Black and white—found its way to Lispenard Street. Members of the New York Manumission Society, radical white reformers, and poor Black laborers all passed through. Fugitives came too, often in the dead of night: men and women who had slipped away from docks or boarding houses, who had hidden in ships’ holds or walked north by starlight.
Ruggles’s business model, if one could call it that, was unsustainable on purpose. He used the meager profits from book sales to subsidize housing, legal fees and travel for fugitives. According to later accounts and his own reports, he helped more than 600 people escape slavery—an astonishing number for a man whose career as an activist lasted barely a decade.
In a sense, the bookstore was a border crossing: the point at which a fugitive, stepping over the threshold, entered a fragile sort of citizenship, however contested.
The Vigilance Committee and the “Kidnapping Club”
If the bookstore was the front room of Ruggles’s activism, the New York Committee of Vigilance was the war room.
In 1835, Ruggles and several other young Black activists formed the Committee in response to an alarming trend. New York had officially abolished slavery in 1827, but the city’s police officers and private “blackbirders” routinely grabbed Black men, women and children off the streets, hauled them before compliant judges, and shipped them south on flimsy or fabricated proof that they were fugitive slaves. Ruggles dubbed the collusion between police and kidnappers the “New York Kidnapping Club”—a phrase that would echo in later histories and even a 21st-century study of policing and slavery’s legacy.
As secretary of the Committee, he organized something like an early civil-rights law office combined with a mutual-aid society. When a Black person was seized, Committee members raced to the jail, demanding a jury trial. They raised funds for lawyers, hunted down witnesses, and scoured shipping schedules. Ruggles wrote blistering public letters naming captains who ferried kidnapped Black people south and judges who rubber-stamped their removal.
The case of William Dixon in 1837 illustrates how far Ruggles was willing to push. Dixon, a 30-year-old whitewasher, was arrested and accused of being “Jake,” a man enslaved in Baltimore who had escaped five years earlier. Ruggles and the Committee mounted a noisy, public campaign, trying even to free Dixon by force outside the courthouse. In the end, they won in court; Dixon was declared a free man.
Victories like that were rare, and they came at a cost. Ruggles was assaulted multiple times, jailed at least once, and nearly kidnapped himself on two occasions. His bookstore was again attacked. Fellow abolitionists, unnerved by his direct-action tactics and sharp tongue, quietly distanced themselves.
Yet the Vigilance Committee model spread. Similar organizations formed in Philadelphia, Boston and elsewhere, drawing directly from Ruggles’s playbook of legal defense, public shaming, and underground logistics.
Frederick Douglass at the Bookshop Door
Of all the fugitives who passed through 36 Lispenard Street, none would become more famous than the man who arrived there on a September morning in 1838 with forged sailors’ papers and a borrowed sailor’s uniform.
Frederick Washington Bailey had slipped out of Baltimore two days earlier, hopping trains and steamboats in a desperate improvisation. When he reached New York, he was alone, nearly penniless and acutely aware that kidnappers scoured the docks. On the second day, someone told him to find David Ruggles.
“Upon reaching New York, I was directed to David Ruggles, at that time the secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee,” Douglass later wrote. “I had been in New York but a few days, when Mr. Ruggles sought me out, and very kindly took me to his boarding-house at the corner of Church and Lispenard Streets.”
While Ruggles was juggling the high-profile “Darg case”—a convoluted legal battle over a fugitive man accused of robbing his enslaver—he still found time to shepherd Bailey through the fragile early days of freedom. He urged him to send for Anna Murray, the free Black woman who had helped finance his escape, and then arranged their marriage in his parlor, with Reverend James Pennington, himself a self-emancipated man from Maryland, officiating.
On Ruggles’s advice, the newly named Frederick Douglass and his wife left New York for New Bedford, Massachusetts, where a whaling economy offered more work and a slightly less hostile racial climate. It was there that Douglass would hone the oratorical and literary voice that transformed him into the most famous Black abolitionist of the 19th century.
In nearly every retelling of his escape, Douglass returned to the image of Ruggles as both caretaker and strategist—a man whose cramped book-lined rooms doubled as a nerve center of Black self-liberation.
A Radical Pen, a Divided Movement
If Ruggles had only run the bookstore and the Vigilance Committee, his place in history would be secure. But he was also, as one biographer put it, a “prototype for Black activist journalists,” pouring out articles and pamphlets that made him one of the most widely read Black writers of his day.
In 1838 he launched The Mirror of Liberty, a magazine that mixed hard reporting on kidnappings, court cases and Vigilance Committee work with essays on women’s rights and poetry. It’s often described as the first periodical in the United States written, edited and published by a Black person.
Ruggles also wielded his pen against powerful allies. He denounced the American Colonization Society, which promoted deporting free Black people to Liberia rather than ending slavery. He criticized clergy who refused to condemn slaveholding members and Northern merchants whose profits depended on the cotton trade.
That uncompromising stance won him admiration from some quarters and hostility from others. Within the abolitionist movement, strategic and personal rifts deepened in the late 1830s. Ruggles’s feud with Samuel Cornish, editor of The Colored American, over finances and tactics became particularly bitter. Cornish demanded an audit of the Committee of Vigilance’s books; amid accusations of mismanagement, Ruggles was forced to resign as secretary.
By 1840, the “most active man in the city,” as one contemporary called him, was exhausted, nearly blind and largely alienated from the institutions he had helped build.
From Underground Railroad to Water Cure
Ill health finally did what mobs and courts could not: it drove Ruggles out of New York.
In 1842, Lydia Maria Child, a white abolitionist and close friend, arranged for him to move to the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian commune in western Massachusetts aligned with abolition and women’s rights.
There, amid mills and farm fields along the Mill River, Ruggles encountered hydrotherapy—the “water cure”—a popular European health fad that promised relief through cold baths, wet-sheet wraps and strict diets. Under the remote guidance of a German-trained doctor, he began treating his own chronic inflammation, headaches and near-blindness.
The recovery, partial though it was, yielded a second career. Ruggles developed a reputation as an intuitive healer, able, as one admirer put it, to sense ailments through “cutaneous electricity,” the buzz of information under the skin. By 1845 he was treating neighbors informally; by 1846 he had secured loans, purchased a property at what is now 47 Florence Road, and opened the Northampton Water Cure.
Patients came from across New England, including abolitionist luminaries like William Lloyd Garrison and William Cooper Nell. The man whose bookstore had once been burned by a mob was now a modestly prosperous Black property owner and physician of sorts, presiding over a health retreat in a region that would soon become synonymous with transcendentalism and reform.
Yet he never entirely left the struggle. Even in Florence, Ruggles agitated against slavery, mentored younger activists, and opened his home to fugitives. When Basil Dorsey, a formerly enslaved man he had helped in New York, settled nearby, the old network of refuge and resistance quietly reassembled itself along the Mill River.
Ruggles died on December 16, 1849, at 39, after a bout of intestinal inflammation. His grave in Florence does not record his role in Douglass’s escape, the hundreds of fugitives he aided, or the bookstore that once smoldered on a Manhattan street. Those stories survive in pamphlets, court records and the memories of those he helped—fragments that historians have only recently begun to stitch back together.
The Long Shadow of a Small Shop
In recent years, scholars and activists have begun to argue that David Ruggles deserves to sit alongside Douglass, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth in the pantheon of abolitionist heroes. Some have gone further, calling him—controversially—the “founder of the Underground Railroad,” at least in its organized, urban form.
What makes his story especially resonant now is not only the daring of his rescue work but the way he fused that work with information—how he turned print culture and a physical space full of books into tools of direct action.
His bookstore prefigured a tradition of Black-owned bookshops that would re-emerge a century later as hubs for civil-rights organizing and Black Power politics, spaces that were, in turn, surveilled and harassed by police and the FBI. Modern historians trace a line from Ruggles’s Lispenard Street “incendiary depot” to mid-20th-century shops like Drum and Spear in Washington, D.C., and Liberation Bookstore in Harlem—and to today’s wave of independent Black bookstores that frame literacy as a form of self-defense.
The pattern is familiar: when Black communities build spaces to read, gather and imagine different futures, the state and its proxies often read them as threats.
For all its heroism, Ruggles’s story is also a cautionary one about the cost of that work. He lived fast and hard, burning through his health and his alliances. His peers sometimes found him abrasive, inflexible, obsessed. If he had been less so, perhaps he would have lived longer. It is equally possible that, had he been milder, fewer people would have reached freedom’s threshold through his door.
What a Radical Bookseller Left Behind
Walk down Church Street in lower Manhattan today and you won’t find a plaque marking the spot where Frederick Douglass slept with fear still clinging to his clothes, where fugitives rehearsed their stories for skeptical judges and abolitionists argued over tactics amid leaning piles of pamphlets.
The building is gone; so is the bookstore. But in Florence, Massachusetts, a small museum—the David Ruggles Center for History and Education—has taken up the task of telling his story. It sits not far from the old water-cure property, on land where Ruggles once bathed patients in cold river water and plotted abolitionist strategy with neighbors.
Inside are documents and artifacts that knit together the fragments: his handbills; a copy of The Mirror of Liberty; accounts of the Vigilance Committee’s cases; memories of the fugitives he hid upstairs above the shop. Together, they suggest a more expansive definition of a bookstore—not just a place that sells books, but a place where ideas are converted into action, where literacy becomes logistics.
David Ruggles never became wealthy from books. He didn’t live to see slavery abolished. What he did instead, in a narrow window of time, was to prove that a Black-owned space filled with the printed word could destabilize one of the most powerful systems on earth.
He showed that a door with a bell on it, opened and reopened to strangers in need, could be as revolutionary as any speech. And he left a challenge that still hangs in the air wherever Black bookstores gather readers under their roofs: if this much could be done from a single room on Lispenard Street, what might be possible now?