On November 20, 1835, David Ruggles, a Black abolitionist living in New York City, founds the New York Committee of Vigilance, an interracial collective working to protect free Black New Yorkers and fugitive former slaves from kidnappers and police. Its stated goal: to “protect unoffending, defenseless and endangered persons of color, by securing their rights as far as practicable.”
Though New York State had abolished slavery in 1827, the city’s economy depended on its trade with the Southern plantation economy. Wall Street financiers and merchants, who depended on the shipping of slave-grown cotton, encouraged New York Police Department officers to operate “kidnapping clubs,” which sought to arrest as many Black men, women and children as possible and ship them south for sale without even a trial by jury. They were enabled by corrupt judges, politicians, highly paid bounty hunters and others.
Ruggles and the NYCV believed that forceful confrontation with slave owners was often necessary in the pursuit of abolition and the emancipation of Black New Yorkers. With the support of an organized network of Black and white New Yorkers, he and his comrades boarded ships in the New York harbor to rescue Black captives and guide them to safety, and petitioned for jury trials for Black New Yorkers arrested as fugitives. They assembled a network of safe houses and churches that became stops on the Underground Railroad. Funds were raised to shelter, clothe and feed fugitives, as well as to pay for lawyers in the aforementioned jury trials. All the while, members of this network acted as informants, providing the NYCV with tips about suspicious activities and people.
By 1838, Ruggles and the NYCV had reportedly rescued over 500 individuals from being sold into slavery, including escaped-slave-turned-abolitionist-icon Frederick Douglass. While Ruggles was forced to retire from his activist work due to his declining health, the NYCV inspired abolitionists in cities across the northern United States to create similar groups to defend Black Americans seeking freedom from slavery.
