The Courage They Didn’t Teach: Before Frederick Douglass, David Ruggles Opened the Door

Each entry follows one life that faced danger, opposition, or erasure and stood firm without promise of reward. Some endured violence in the open. Others absorbed pressure in silence. Together, these stories show courage as a skill shaped by striving and refined long before applause, if applause came at all.

A door looks like a small thing until someone is running for his life.

Frederick Douglass reached New York in September 1838 after escaping slavery in Maryland. Freedom had come, but safety hadn't. He was alone in a city where slave catchers and kidnappers could turn a free morning into chains by nightfall.

David Ruggles found him, brought him into his boardinghouse, and helped him survive the dangerous first days of liberty.

David Ruggles: 1810-1849

Ruggles then helped reunite Douglass with Anna Murray. On Sept. 15, the couple married in Ruggles's home. Ruggles advised them to continue to New Bedford, Mass., where Douglass could build a life beyond the immediate reach of those haunting him.

From the Library of Congress:

On September 3, 1838, abolitionist, journalist, author, and human rights advocate Frederick Douglass made his dramatic escape from slavery—traveling north by train and boat—from Baltimore, through Delaware, to Philadelphia. That same night, he took a train to New York, where he arrived the following morning.

“On Monday, the third day of September, 1838, in accordance with my resolution, I bade farewell to the city of Baltimore, and to that slavery which had been my abhorrence from childhood.”

Born into slavery on a plantation in Tuckahoe, Maryland, circa 1817, he was the son of a Black mother and an unidentified white father. He never knew the date of his birth, but celebrated his birthday on February 14 in memory of his mother, who had brought him a heart-shaped cake on the night that he last saw her.

Only a small boy when his mother died, Douglass, born Frederick Bailey, lived with his grandmother in the slave quarters until he was eight years old, when he was “hired out” and sent to work in the home of Hugh Auld. While working for the Auld family in Baltimore, Frederick began to acquire a formal education. Mrs. Auld broke Maryland state law in order to teach the young boy to read, and Frederick later tried to learn all he could from schoolboys he met on the streets of Baltimore.

Ruggles had been opening doors long before Douglass walked through his.

Born free in Connecticut in 1810, he moved to New York while still young and entered the abolitionist fight with unusual force. His grocery became a reading room and circulating library for black New Yorkers barred from other libraries.

He later operated what is recognized as the nation's first black-owned bookstore, filling its shelves with antislavery material.

From the David Ruggles Center:

David Ruggles was born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1810, the eldest of seven children, to free black parents. His father, David Sr., was a blacksmith. His mother, Nancy, was a noted caterer and a founding member of the local Methodist church. Ruggles was educated at religious charity schools in Norwich.

Anti-Slavery and Racial Equity Activism in New York

By 1827, Ruggles was in New York working as a mariner. In 1828 he opened a grocery shop. By the early 1830s, Ruggles became involved in the growing anti-slavery movement in New York, advocating for “practical abolitionism,” arguing that abolitionists should not just philosophize about the day slavery would end, but strive to help all victims of human bondage. He also advocated the use of civil disobedience and self-defense.

Ruggle’s grocery shop at One Cortlandt Street was also a circulating library and reading room for African Americans who were denied access to New York’s public libraries. His was the nation’s first black-owned bookstore, and there Ruggles sold anti-slavery publications until it was destroyed by a mob. In 1833, The Emancipator, an abolitionist weekly, appointed him as an agent to canvas for subscribers throughout the mid-Atlantic states. By 1834, now on Lispenard Street, Ruggles was also writing regularly, publishing dozens of articles and pamphlets for newspapers throughout the Northeast. Between 1838 and 1841 he wrote, printed and published the first journal edited by an African-American, The Mirror of Liberty.

Books weren't enough for Ruggles; he helped found the New York Committee of Vigilance in 1835. Its work was direct: protect freedom seekers, fight kidnappings of free black people, provide legal help, and confront the men who made money dragging human beings south.

Ruggles reportedly helped at least 600 enslaved people toward freedom. He openly confronted slave catchers, challenged authorities, and sometimes entered homes where slaves were being held to inform them of rights available under New York law.

Courage collected its bill.

Ruggles was assaulted, his store was destroyed, men tried to kidnap him, lynching threats followed him, and even some abolitionists believed his tactics went too far. Years of danger and physical strain left him sick and nearly blind before he was 32.

He moved to Florence, Mass., in 1842 and joined an abolitionist community there. Treatment restored some of his health and sight, and Ruggles eventually became a practitioner of hydropathy, or the "water cure."

David Ruggles Center:

In 1842, in failing health, Ruggles moved to what is now Florence, Massachusetts; his name being put before the membership committee of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a “utopian” community established by abolitionists. As he settled in Florence, Ruggles found much needed companionship and rest. He soon organized a rally of Black citizens to support imprisoned Massachusetts abolitionists Charles Torrey and Jonathan Walker.

Treating himself with the techniques of “Watercure,” then in vogue, David Ruggles recovered some of his sight and much of his health. In 1847 he erected the first building in the nation dedicated exclusively to hydropathy. Perhaps his most famous patient was William Lloyd Garrison, but he also treated luminaries Lucy Stone, Mary Brown -John Brown’s wife-, and Catherine Beecher, as well as Sojourner Truth.

Ruggles continually suffered from poor health, the result of injuries incurred by his anti-slavery activism in New York. Tragically, at the young age of 39, his ailments flared up again, and on the 16th of December, 1849, David Ruggles died in Florence, Massachusetts.  

He kept serving others even after the New York years had nearly broken him.

He died on Dec. 16, 1849, at only 39.

Frederick Douglass became one of the towering voices of American history. Ruggles never reached anything close to the same fame.

Yet history often turns on someone standing beside an ordinary door at the right hour. 

Douglass later recounted his friend, David Ruggles:

In 1894, the renowned statesman and abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote his recollections of meeting David Ruggles, published in “What I Saw at the Northampton Association” in Charles Sheffield’s History of Florence, 1894.

“Here, at least, neither my color nor my condition was counted against me. I found here my old friend, David Ruggles, not only black, but blind, and measurably helpless, but a man of sterling sense and worth. He had been caught up in New York City, rescued from destitution, brought here and kindly cared for. I speak of David Ruggles as my old friend. He was such to me only as he had been to others in the same plight. Before he was old and blind he had been a coworker with the venerable Quaker, Isaac T. Hopper, and had assisted me as well as many other fugitive slaves, on the way from slavery to freedom. 

It was good to see that this man who had zealously assisted others was now receiving assistance from the benevolent men and women of this Community, and if a grateful heart in a recipient of benevolence is any compensation for such benevolence, the friends of David Ruggles were well compensated. His whole theme to me was gratitude to these noble people. 

For his blindness he was hydropathically treated in the Community. He himself became well versed in the water cure system, and was subsequently at the head of a water cure establishment at Florence. He acquired such sensitiveness of touch that he could, by feeling the patient, easily locate the disease, and was, therefore, very successful in treating his patients.”

Ruggles didn't know what Douglass would become when he took him in; he only knew a hunted man needed shelter, a young couple needed help, and evil had to be resisted while it was still standing in the street.

Some men become famous for walking through doors.

David Ruggles deserves remembrance for keeping one open.

Next up in the series: Joseph Cinqué

Joseph Cinqué, also known as Sengbe Pieh, was kidnapped in West Africa and illegally transported into slavery. In 1839, he freed himself aboard La Amistad and led other captives in seizing the ship.

Their struggle moved from the deck of a schooner to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the surviving captives won their freedom in 1841. Cinqué’s story asks what courage looks like when captivity leaves resistance as the only road home.

Other columns in this series