David Ruggles was a free Black man born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1810. He moved to the city of New York in 1826 where he worked as a mariner, eventually opened a grocery, and later ran book store. An active opponent of slavery, Ruggles was a sales agent for abolitionist newspapers, published his own anti-slavery journal, and was secretary of the New York Vigilance Committee aiding freedom seekers who escaped from slavery, helping them evade slavecatchers, and providing legal assistance if they were captured.
One of the people Ruggles helped to escape from slavery was Frederick Douglass.
On December 28, 1836, between 1 and 2 o’clock in the morning, slavecatchers, members of the notorious New York “Kidnapping Club,” tried to break into Ruggles’ home at the corner of Church and Lispenard streets and arrest him on a phony warrant claiming he was a fugitive slave who would be returned to his owners in the South.
They were unsuccessful, but the next morning, when Ruggles went to City Hall to press charges against the men who tried to break into his home, he was arrested by slave-catcher Tobias Boudinot, charged with assault, and incarcerated at the city’s Bellevue prison.
The best histories of Ruggles and the Kidnapping Club are a biography of David Ruggles by Graham Hodges (University of North Carolina Press, 2010) and a monograph by Jonathan Wells (Bold Type, 2020).
Boudinot arrested Ruggles using a four year old warrant that empowered him to seize any African American in New York State named “Jesse, Abraham, Peter, or Silva” as a fugitive slave and forcibly ship them South into enslavement without an appearance before a magistrate. Ruggles, with wide support from local abolitionists was able to avoid this fate and he was released from jail.
In September 1838, Ruggles was arrested again and accused of “aiding and abetting the slave Tom in robbing his master” by “concealing the fugitive.” The theft in this case was Thomas Hughes stealing the master’s human property, himself, and an amount of money widely estimated at between $150 and $8,000.
According to a report in the Morning Herald on September 10, “A vast number of abolitionists, and other crazy fanatics, pressed toward the magistrate’s desk to witness the proceedings, and who seemed to take a great interest in the result.”
The article claimed the behavior of Ruggles and his supporters “fully justifies the arrest of Ruggles… and exhibit the miserable gang to which they belong to be but a very little better than a band of freebooters.” Ruggles was jailed for three days until he was released on bail provided by abolitionists including Arthur Tappan an officer of the Committee of Vigilance.
The Fugitive Slave Clause of the United States Constitution in Article IV, Section 2, required that any person “held to Service or Labour in one State… escaping into another… shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due,” without any provision for legal due process later included in the fifth amendment of the Bill of Rights.
The first Fugitive Slave Act in the United States was passed by Congress in 1793 and signed into law by President George Washington. It empowered “the person to whom such labor or service may be due, his agent or attorney… to seize or arrest such fugitive from labor,… upon proof to the satisfaction of such Judge or magistrate, either by oral testimony or affidavit… that the person so seized or arrested, doth, under the laws of the State or Territory from which he or she fled, owe service or labor to the person claiming him or her… shall be sufficient warrant for removing the said fugitive from labor to the State or Territory from which he or she fled.”
Essentially, testimony by the slaveholder or his or her agent was all that was required to send a Black into slavery and no provision was made in the law for self-defense.
In response to abuses of the slave system, this and succeeding fugitive slave laws were overturned by the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution which outlawed slavery in the United States and the 14th Amendment that prohibited states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
The amendment specifically ensured the right of due process to “any person,” and did not limit it to citizens or legal residents.
The 14th Amendment was in effect until in the last two months when the Trump administration, through a series of subterfuge actions aimed at undocumented immigrants and political dissidents legally in the United States has re-instituted the fugitive slave law’s denial of due process to persons, brought back street seizures by unidentified agents in unmarked cars in a revitalized Kidnapper’s Club, and swiftly moving people out of the jurisdiction were that seized before they can mount a legal defense.
In New York, a mother and her three children were detained by immigration enforcement on a dairy farm in Northern New York and quickly shipped to a detention center in Texas while they were in the process of navigating the immigration system and attending immigration court hearings.
Mahmoud Khalil, a protest leader at Columbia University last spring, a legal permanent resident married to a United States citizen, was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at his Manhattan apartment building and taken to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana.
The Trump administration claims his incarceration without due process is legal under an obscure provision of a 1952 Cold War era law that authorizes the Secretary of State to deport someone who “would have serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
Another Columbia University student involved in the spring protests, Leqaa Kordia, was seized by ICE for allegedly remaining in the United States after her student visa expired.
Ranjani Srinivasan, a Columbia University doctoral candidate in urban planning from India, fled the United States after her student visa was revoked because she participated in the protests
According to ICE’s website, in January 2025, it arrested for deportation 114 individuals in New York on immigration violations, 32 of whom had no criminal warrants and another 17 were charged with traffic violations.
BREAKING: Thursday it was revealed that 133 people were arrested during an “operation” which took place in late March when 84 were arrested in the Buffalo and Rochester areas and another 49 people in the Syracuse, Albany, Rouses Point and Massena areas.
Read more about other Black New Yorkers kidnapped into slavery before the Civil War.
Illustrations, from above: Illustration of Lee Kidnapping in the Anti-Slavery Almanac, 1839; “The Disappointed Abolitionists,” by Edward Williams Clay, ca. 1838 (Library of Congress); A Northern Kidnapping on the cover of the The Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1839.
