Overview Of The New York Vigilance Committee

The New York Vigilance Committee began its life in 1835, and did a tremendous work in order to help the fugitive slaves arriving in the city. In fact, there are three ways in which it aided in the antislavery cause during the 1830s and 1840s.
The first one is the way the organization fought slave kidnapping. As we can read in the book, “Most of [the organization’s] attention was devoted to kidnapping cases.” (Page 64) A lot of slave owners ‘hired’ kidnapers, who travelled to New York for example, to bring back the slaves who have ran away from their owner. It was common for them to choose a random black man in the street, make him be someone else, a slave belonging to one slave owner, and bring him to the court, where they usually couldn’t

Most of the time, these operations happened by steamboat, or costal vessels. A man who did a lot for this cause was David Ruggles, born in 1810 and whom main activity was abolitionism. We can read in the book “As a result, Ruggles devoted considerable efforts to helping fugitives avoid apprehension.” Or “Much of the vigilance committee’s success in its first few years can be attributed to the indefatigable Ruggles, ‘the most active man in the city’ […].” He led the organization at its beginning, he hosted and fed the fugitive before dispatching them to the North, he wrote and published the vigilance committee’s monthly meetings in the Emancipator, Colored American, and even his own periodical, The Mirror of Liberty. He also took care of enlisting “a group of antislavery lawyers to take cases of kidnapping to court and to contest the rendition of fugitives. Thus, the organization became more and more known and many people knew how to put fugitives in contact with it. The committee was then able to meet them at the docks where they arrived by boat, to arrange lodging for them, and then to send them to the