Wh David Ruggles Essay

New York was an important and active center of Underground Railroad activity. When William Seward was governor, the state enacted several “personal liberty’ measures that, decided that any slave entering the state except a fugitive automatically became free. In addition, New York was the home of the largest free black community at that time, making it attractive for fugitives who would need help if they got as far as that state. It also had a sizable liberal white community of abolitionist. Froner’s account of the efforts of slaves to get north to freedom emphasizes that, although there were many heroic whites who helped, even their efforts would hardly have been possible “without the courage and resourcefulness, in a hostile environment, of blacks,” ranging from those northern free blacks who served on abolition committees to “the ordinary men and women”

Ruggles’s conviction that combating slavery required direct action – and not necessarily nonviolent direct action – would come to be shared by more abolitionists after the passage of Fugitive Slave Law 1850. During the 1840’s, thanks in large part to the advocacy of vigilance committees in New York and elsewhere, many northern states passed laws prohibiting their public officials from participating in the recapture of slaves and adopting the “freedom principle” that slaves brought by their owners to a state where slavery was illegal automatically became free. “The Fugitive Slave Law reinvigorated and radicalized the underground railroad,” Foner writes. From Norfolk, Va and Wilmington, Del, in the slave states to Albany and Syracuse in upstate New York, key way stations on the route to Canada, activists intensified their efforts and solidified informal arrangements into a strong if still loose network whose bub was New York