Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [450]
Ruggles identified slavecatchers by name in the Emancipator. He pointed them out to blacks on the street. He publicized descriptions of missing Afro-Americans. He went door to door in fashionable neighborhoods inquiring as to the status of black domestics, implementing a New York law that freed any imported slave after a residence of nine months. At hearings of accused runaways before Recorder Riker, Ruggles presented counterwitnesses, though, as they were usually black, their testimony seldom helped. He also boarded incoming ships, to see if slaves were being smuggled in, and on one occasion won an indictment against a Frenchman from Guadeloupe. (Such actions were denounced by the New York Express, a militant Whig organ, as an embarrassment to trade.) Ruggles had to change lodgings repeatedly to foil efforts at kidnapping him.
The Vigilance Committee also aided those they called “persons arriving from the South.” They explained to fugitives their rights, protected them from blackbirders, and established them in new locations. In his first annual report, presented at Theodore Wright’s church in 1837, Ruggles announced that the group had protected 335 persons from slavery. The following year he sheltered the young Frederick Douglass for two weeks, before sending the penniless fugitive on to New Bedford, Massachusetts.1 The bulk of funds for the Committee of Vigilance’s work—efforts Lewis Tappan later praised as crucial to the developing Underground Railroad—was (Ruggles acknowledged) “obtained by the efforts of the Ladies, who collect from their friends one penny a week.” In Brooklyn, Bridge Street African Methodist Episcopal Wesleyan became a major underground station, eventually providing refuge, food, and clothing for hundreds of escaped slaves. Some whites too took serious risks: Quaker Isaac T. Hopper’s home, at no Second Avenue, became a noted way station, and in 1835 Hopper was accused of harboring a fugitive slave in his store on Pearl Street.
The Vigilance Committee was not always successful. On July 23, 1836, George Jones, a “respectable” free black man, was arrested at his workplace, an attorney’s office at 21 Broadway, supposedly for assault and battery. At first he refused to go along with his captors, but his employers advised him to submit, promising they would help. However, once in custody, Jones was whisked before Recorder Riker, where several notorious blackbirders declared him a runaway, a proposition to which Riker assented. Less than three hours after his arrest, Jones, bound in chains, was dragged through the streets of New York “like a beast to the shambles” and carried south. Ruggles described the kidnapping in the Sun. The piece, widely reprinted, helped Ruggles win public support for granting accused “fugitives” a trial by jury—a right secured five years later.
34
Rail Boom
New York’s rival coastal cities, badly undercut by the Erie Canal and facing commercial catastrophe, retaliated by building their own canals, but frenzied ditch digging availed them little. Boston was just too far from the western wheat fields, and its capitalists shifted their funds into manufacturing. Philadelphia’s businessmen, lacking New York’s break in the Appalachians, redirected their investments into mining. Baltimore was closest to the fertile West, but constructing a canal proved prohibitively costly. With the daring of desperation, at a town meeting in 1826, its citizens decided to build a railroad. In 1827 the Maryland legislature chartered the Baltimore and Ohio, and on July 4, 1828, Charles Carroll, last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, broke ground for the B&O amid fireworks, floats, and speeches.
The B&O planned to use horses for motive power. Locomotive engines had been around since England’s Richard Trevithick had built the first one back in 1804, but as of the mid-1820s they were still cumbrous affairs, suitable only for hauling coal cars. Then, at trials on the Liverpool