In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery.

The house belonged to a relatively obscure Washingtonian, a widow named Ann Sprigg. In those days, boardinghouses like Sprigg’s were fixtures of the capital landscape—where congressmen, senators, government officials, and the like tended to live during legislative sessions. Quarters were often cramped. Men rented a room—or just a bed, or even half of a bed—and communed in shared bathrooms and living spaces, with the day’s debates sometimes carrying over to the dinner table. Many houses developed reputations as being favored by certain factions, turning them into political clubs as much as living quarters.

In 1841, Ann Sprigg’s house came to be known as the “abolition house.” Three anti-slavery Whig congressmen—Seth M. Gates, a New Yorker, William Slade, a Vermonter, and Joshua Giddings, an Ohioan—moved in alongside two prominent abolitionists, Theodore Dwight Weld and Joshua Leavitt. Leavitt—a New Yorker from a landowning family who shared a Sprigg House bed with Weld—quickly set about convincing the representatives to work alongside the wider abolition movement as an anti-slavery lobby. The group became the brain trust behind the first significant congressional campaign to combat slavery from the nation’s capital.

The brain trust’s goal was straightforward: to develop a caucus within the legislature, a lobby to influence the legislature, or at the very least an argument that would challenge the power of slavery and slaveholders in the American government. But it was also radical, representing a major sea change in American history, and ultimately a turning point in slavery’s demise. Up until this point, the anti-slavery movement had largely eschewed politics. Led by William Lloyd Garrison and his followers, the early abolitionists focused strictly on changing hearts and minds—what they called “moralsuasion”—not changing votes. Garrison once even burned copies of the U.S. Constitution (which he called “a Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell!”) on stage—a flaming, charred reflection of the fact that he preferred challenging slaveholder power from outside the halls of power.

By the time the brain trust moved into the Sprigg House, however, the movement had started to splinter, with more abolitionists taking up the banner of political activism. A year prior, one group of abolitionists broke with Garrison by forming their own political party. Known as the Liberty Party, it was the first ever expressly anti-slavery party in American history, though it never registered more than a blip on the national political radar. As a result, many anti-slavery Whigs like Giddings and Slade opted to remain Whigs, where they could challenge slavery within the existing two-party structure.

This shift within the anti-slavery movement was partly a result of recognizing that as of the late 1830s and early 1840s, slavery’s defenders clearly had the upper hand, especially in the United States Congress. In fact, so great was slaveholder influence in the nation’s capital that in 1836 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a series of resolutions that became known as the “Gag Rule.” At the time, constituents would send petitions to their legislators to read on the house floor; the Gag Rule barred the reading of the many anti-slavery petitions congressmen received, which left slavery virtually unchallenged in Congress.

Carroll Row, which included Ann Spriggs’ boarding house, was located at the site of present-day Library of Congress. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

The first task of the boarders in the Sprigg House was to repeal the Gag Rule. Weld and Leavitt helped prepare anti-slavery speeches and advised the congressmen on strategy, forming what Giddings described as an informal “select committee.” They soon found a key ally in president-turned-congressman John Quincy Adams. Though Adams never lived in the Sprigg House, he spent hours there conferring with the boarders. Finally, on December 3, 1844, thanks in no small part to plans hatched at the Sprigg House, Congress repealed the Gag Rule, galvanizing anti-slavery politicians across the country. Many of them later became “Conscience Whigs,” a faction within the Whig Party that opposed slavery, in opposition to their rivals, the pro-slavery “Cotton Whigs.”

While not as radical as many of his “Conscience Whig” colleagues Abraham Lincoln was himself an anti-slavery Whig, and this is perhaps what drew him to the Sprigg House when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1847 as a little-known congressman from Illinois. For the next two years, it was where he slept, ate, and debated his fellow boarders on the major political topics of the day, including the Mexican-American War, the annexation of Texas, and the possible expansion of slavery into the West. Though the other members of the brain trust had moved on by then, Lincoln’s fellow Midwesterner in the House, Giddings, still lodged there, and the two most certainly dined together when in session.

Lincoln spent only a single term in Congress, but his time at the Sprigg House was clearly a formative experience, if not also a fond memory for him. When he returned to Washington more than a decade later, this time as president of a fractured nation, he looked in on Ann Sprigg, who had since moved houses and fallen on hard times. When Lincoln learned that she needed help, he got this “most estimable widow lady” a job working as a clerk in the Treasury Department, a position that allowed her to support her family through the war.

Ann Sprigg died in 1870, and her boardinghouse—and the entire block of row houses on which it stood—was demolished in 1887 to build the Library of Congress. Since then, the story of this old D.C. boarding house and the woman who ran it has been largely forgotten. The history of the anti-slavery movement has often focused on bigger, more prominent figures and emphasized the work of activists based in New England or New York and not necessarily a slaveholding city like Washington, D.C.

Yet for the better part of a decade, Ann Sprigg’s abolition house formed the nucleus of a new political attack against slavery. It was there at the dining room table that anti-slavery politicos put together a strategy for combatting slavery within the halls of Congress, a change that thrust anti-slavery activism away from the fringe and placed it right in the heart of American politics.

Editor’s note: This piece has been updated to reflect that while Joshua Leavitt came from a wealthy family, he was not personally wealthy.

The post The D.C. Boarding House That Moved the Needle on Slavery appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Douglass’ savior was none other than David Ruggles, a free black man who was the secretary and general organizer of the New York Committee of Vigilance or NYCV, an abolitionist organization that battled slave catchers, kidnappers, and slave traders—and offered succor to hundreds of self-liberated people.

David Ruggles was arguably the first full-time black activist in the United States. He operated New York’s first library and bookstore for black people, edited and sold newspapers and magazines, and founded a black high school and a literary society. An innovator, he combined his activism with commerce by operating a grocery that only sold products made without enslaved labor. Over the course of his life, Ruggles was a true 19th-century Renaissance Man, a visionary political leader, a savvy street fighter, and a healer. He didn’t share Frederick Douglass’ fame or good fortune, but he was an indelible influence on the younger man—crucial to forging the legend that Douglass was to become.

In his 1845 narrative and in subsequent writings, Douglass used capital letters when he credited Ruggles with saving his freedom. He wasn’t being hyperbolic. Having fled from slavery in Maryland, Douglass was highly vulnerable to slave catchers or “black birds” who preyed upon northern African Americans, seizing them to exchange for cash and shipment into perpetual bondage in the South. During Douglass’ first 10 days out of enslavement, it was Ruggles’ home he stayed in as he launched his life as a free man. There Douglass married his fiancé, Anna Murray, in a ceremony at Ruggles’ house officiated by Reverend James W. C. Pennington, who escaped from slavery himself in 1828 and now served as pastor of the First Congregational Church of Hartford, Connecticut.

During his stay on Lispenard St., Douglass also absorbed Ruggles’ passion and erudition, receiving a crash course in radical abolitionism. Ruggles’s home, it’s important to note, was ground central for the Underground Railroad on the East Coast, and there Douglass met dozens of self-emancipated men and women passing through. He watched from a court gallery as Ruggles became one of the first black men to act as a lawyer in an American court, cross-examining a white man during a trial. Douglass watched Ruggles produce an issue of the nation’s first black magazine, the Mirror of Liberty, from his store—and absorbed an important piece of wisdom from his new mentor: writing was fighting.

After those 10 tumultuous days, Douglass and his new wife headed off to Underground Railroad operators in New Bedford, Massachusetts, known as the Fugitive’s Gibraltar, where Douglass soon began his own career as an activist. Ruggles had sent the couple on their way with a letter of recommendation and a five-dollar bill that, along with many others he dispensed to freed men, was to cause him great trouble later on.

Ruggles was born in Norwich, Connecticut, in 1810 to freeborn parents, David, Sr., a woodcutter, and Nancy, a famed caterer. As a child, he was an excellent student, and his school imported a Latin tutor to work with him. If Ruggles had been white, perhaps he would have studied at Yale, become a Congregational minister, and achieved public leadership in church and politics. But Ruggles was black—and eager to subvert authority as he led. The young man joined the anti-slavery movement in 1828 under the mentorship of the Rev. Samuel Eli Cornish, editor of the Freedom’s Journal, America’s first black newspaper. Ruggles made his first waves as an activist when he hired self-emancipated black people at a grocery shop he had opened in New York City in 1827. Arsonists burned the store down, twice.

Undeterred, Ruggles became an agent for the abolitionist Liberator and Emancipator newspapers, canvassing for subscriptions in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions. He attended the black conventions that were held annually in the 1830s, representing younger, militant African American New Yorkers. A vast number of editorials and pamphlets he authored reveal his thinking: In 1835 letters to the Emancipator, for instance, Ruggles decried free black indifference to the anti-slavery cause. Spending money on tobacco and alcohol instead of subscribing to the newspaper, he wrote, showed a lack of manhood. Free blacks should help battle the American Colonization Society, a national scheme that proposed forced exile of free blacks to Africa on the basis that perceived inferiority disqualified them to be American citizens.

Ruggles battled for what he termed “practical abolitionism.” In a famous speech in 1835, he proclaimed that slavery’s end was a noble goal, but blacks had to fight other inequities too. He urged them to resist the slave catching gangs that roamed New York City streets, seizing black people who, they claimed, might be fugitives. Corrupt magistrates, viewing black people as property without rights, quickly spirited the accused off for sale into slavery. Ruggles castigated kidnapping and argued that every person had the right “to resist unto death.”

Around that time, Ruggles helped found the NYVC, which litigated court cases to help formerly enslaved people and to thwart slave traders. The organization quickly became the template for dozens of similar societies and earned renown among self-emancipated slaves from Virginia north.

Ruggles strongly believed that women were a key part of the abolitionist movement. He authored a pamphlet, “The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment,” in which he demanded that northern women shun their southern sisters who, by their silence, accommodated the rape of enslaved black women by their husbands, sons, and brothers. At his store, Ruggles proudly displayed the published work of Maria Stewart, a pioneering African American poet and lecturer. Perhaps most importantly, Ruggles got as many as a thousand New York City black women to buy subscriptions to the newspapers he represented. These women became the eyes and ears of the movement.

Politics amongst the abolitionists were often fierce and divisive. Soon after Douglass’ departure for New Bedford, Ruggles became embroiled in a libel case that resulted in an acrimonious dispute with Cornish, now editor of the Colored American, the nation’s leading black newspaper. The argument led to an examination of the Vigilance Committee’s financial books. Under audit, Ruggles could not account for the numerous $5 bills he had given to self-emancipated people like Douglass.

David Ruggles stands between two men in this 1838 lithograph by Edward Williams Clay about the Darg trial. The texts above their heads read, left to right: “Verily friend Darg since we have returned thee thy money, I claim the reward of $1000 – Brother Barney Corse was merely my agent, verily!” A second man says: “Yea verily I was but thy instrument Brother Hopper as Brother Ruggles here knoweth!” Man at right, holding bag marked $6908, tells them to “get out of the house.” Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Because of that Ruggles was drummed out as secretary of the Vigilance Committee. He continued to edit pamphlets, articles and the Mirror of Liberty, but before long was beset by blindness, stomach worms and other maladies. Half-dead, he roamed New York and New England, attending dinners thrown in his support by admiring young activists such as black radicals Pennington and William Wells Brown, white radical Charles Torrey. Ruggles also got support at one such dinner from Douglass, who introduced him, read passages from the Mirror of Liberty, announced that he was becoming an agent for the magazine, and pledged to raise $50 to support Ruggles and his journalism.

Ruggles continued to fight through deeds and in the field of ideas. In the early summer of 1841, during a fund-raising trip, he was evicted from his seats on a railroad car and steamship journey after he refused to retreat to the sections reserved for black passengers. “While I advocate the principals of equal liberty, it is my duty to practice what I preach,” he declared.

During a similar confrontation over seating a few weeks later, Ruggles was tossed off a moving train, got badly injured, and lost his valise and money. He sued the railroad—unsuccessfully—and the judge’s determination that the company had the right to assign seats caused an uproar among abolitionists. Again, Frederick Douglass led a meeting to protest the decisions, which was attended by Ruggles and white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, a great mentor to Douglass.

Soon after, Ruggles, Douglass and Garrison sailed to a meeting on Nantucket. When the ship’s crew informed black passengers that they could either move to the windy upper deck or get off the boat, Garrison joined his African American comrades. Then, on Nantucket, Douglass gave a series of speeches that electrified his audiences and jumpstarted his career.

As Douglass’ star ascended, Ruggles’ fortunes wobbled. By 1841, Ruggles was practically homeless—abolitionist allies in Massachusetts wound up taking him in—and his health continued to decline. By his own account, he had consulted many eminent physicians and had been repeatedly “bled, leached, cupped, plastered, salivated, doused with arsenic, nuxvomica, iodine, strychnine, and a variety of other poisonous drugs,” to no avail. Then, in 1842, Robert Wesselhoeft of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who practiced hydrotherapy, also known as the water-cure, put Ruggles through a series of rigorous protocols, including weeks of early morning cold showers and full body wraps in cold sheets and bandaging.

Ruggles’ health improved. Enthused, he decided to study hydrotherapy, devoting two years to learning the medical practice. He began composing articles on the water cure for professional journals. He borrowed money from local white businessmen to build a small hydrotherapy hospital in Florence, a village near Northampton. The establishment had 15 beds, and multiple showers and bathing rooms.

Frederick Douglass paid a visit to Northampton in 1844 and met with Ruggles. By then Douglass was a star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, accompanying the famed Hutchinson Family Singers. Douglass, Ruggles, and the singers had a lively time together—some critical observers even noted that the young Abby Hutchinson, one of the singers, “was gallanted to her hotel by one of the members, and he a huge black man.” Ruggles sarcastically identified himself as the escort and noted that he was close friends with leading New York City merchants.

Over the next few years, David Ruggles expanded his career in hydrotherapy, while Frederick Douglass became the most famous abolitionist in America. With Ruggles’ help, Florence became the center of a growing community of free and self-emancipated blacks, including the abolitionist Sojourner Truth and her three daughters, and Basil Dorsey, who had been rescued from a slave catcher in Philadelphia. When Douglass stopped by Florence again in 1845, he was impressed: “There was no high, no low, no masters, no servants, no white, no black,” he wrote, of the community. Douglass also noted that Ruggles was grateful to “these noble people.”

The men stayed in contact. Ruggles was an early subscriber to Douglass’ North Star newspaper in 1848; Douglass, in turn, convinced Ruggles to vote for the Free Soil party ticket in 1848. Hydrotherapy, sadly, did not cure Ruggles’ many ailments and he died, after a short, virulent sickness, on December 16, 1849, at the age of 39.

Douglass wrote a glowing obituary in the North Star. In his second autobiography, published in 1855, Douglass recalled “Mr. Ruggles as the first officer of the under-ground railroad with whom I met after reaching the north, and indeed, the first of whom I heard anything,” an indication that Ruggles’ name was known to many a fugitive slave. Douglass repeated his praise of Ruggles in his 1882 autobiography, revealing his lifelong indebtedness to that “whole-souled man.”

The post The Amazing Life of America’s First Full-Time Black Activist appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To the people of Boston, his capture was an outrage. Seven thousand citizens tried to break him out of jail, and the finest lawyers in Boston tried to make a case for his freedom, all to no avail. On June 2, Burns was escorted to a waiting ship and returned to bondage.

This entire episode had a profound impact on many Bostonians, but one in particular: Amos Adams Lawrence. The Burns episode likely was the first time Lawrence came face-to-face with the evils of slavery, and shortly after Burns was returned to bondage, he wrote to his uncle that “we went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” (The Whig Party was divided over slavery at this time; by 1854, when the Republican Party was organized, the Whigs were no longer a strong force in U.S. politics.)

A print created in Boston in the 1850s showing Anthony Burns and scenes from his life. Image courtesy of Library of Congress.

Lawrence was a somewhat unlikely abolitionist. He was born into one of the bluest of blue-blood families in Boston and had every benefit his family’s wealth could provide, attending Franklin Academy, an elite boarding school, and then Harvard. True, the Lawrence family had a strong philanthropic ethic. Amos’s uncle, Abbott Lawrence, donated $50,000 to Harvard in 1847—which at the time was the largest single donation given to any college in the United States—to establish Lawrence Scientific School, and Amos’s father, also named Amos, retired at age 45 to devote the remainder of his life to philanthropy. In 1854, Amos Adams Lawrence wrote in his private diary that he needed to make enough money in his business practices to support charities that were important to him.

But those business practices made backing an anti-slavery charity unlikely. His family made its fortune in the textile industry, and Lawrence himself created a business niche as a commission merchant selling manufactured textiles produced in New England. Most of the textiles Lawrence and his family produced and sold were made from cotton, which was planted, picked, ginned, baled, and shipped by slaves. This fact presents an interesting conundrum. The Burns episode made Lawrence, as he wrote, “a stark mad abolitionist,” but, as far as we know, the fact that his business relied on the same people he was trying to free did not seem to bother him.

Lawrence very quickly had the opportunity to translate his new-found abolitionism into action. On May 30, 1854, in the midst of the Burns affair, President Franklin Pierce signed into law the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established Kansas and Nebraska as territories but allowed each to decide for themselves, under the concept of popular sovereignty, whether they wanted slavery or not. To many abolitionists, this was an outrage, because it opened the possibility for another slave state to enter the union. Also, with the slave-holding state of Missouri right next door, the pro-slavery side seemed to have an undue advantage.

This was Lawrence’s chance. A friend introduced him to Eli Thayer, who had just organized the Emigrant Aid Company to encourage antislavery settlers to emigrate to Kansas with the goal of making the territory a free state. Lawrence became the company’s treasurer, and immediately began dipping into his pocket to cover expenses. When the first antislavery pioneers arrived in Kansas, they decided to call their new community “Lawrence,” knowing that without their benefactor’s financial aid, their venture likely would not have been possible.

Lawrence was frequently frustrated that the company’s leaders were not aggressive enough to raise money, but he quietly continued to cover the bills. At one point, he confided to his diary, when bills for the Emigrant Aid Company came due, he did not have enough of his own money on hand, so he sold shares in his business to cover the expenses. Whenever there was a need for special funding in Kansas, Lawrence would donate and ask others to do so as well. Lawrence and his brothers, for example, contributed to the purchase of Sharps rifles—the most advanced weapons of the day—for citizens of Lawrence.

44-caliber Sharps percussion sporting rifle used by abolitionist John Brown, ca 1856. Image courtesy of National Museum of American History.

They needed those guns. Because Lawrence, Kansas was the center of the antislavery movement, it became the bullseye of the target of pro-slavery folks. In late 1855, Missourians lined up planning to attack Lawrence in what was called the Wakarusa War. Nothing happened that time, and the Missourians returned home. But less than a year later came the “Sack of Lawrence,” in which pro-slavery Missourians burned much of the town to the ground. Amos Lawrence continued to support the effort to make Kansas a free state. In 1857, Lawrence again dug into his pocket and donated $12,696 to establish a fund “for the advancement of religious and intellectual education of the young in Kansas.”

Eventually, in 1861, Kansas was admitted to the Union as a free state. The town of Lawrence played an important role in this development, and several of its residents became leaders in the early state government. But the wounds of the territorial period continued to fester. In August 1863, during the Civil War, Lawrence burned again: Willian Clarke Quantrill, a Confederate guerrilla chieftain, led his cutthroat band into the town, killed more than 200 men and boys, and set the place on fire.

Just several months before, Lawrence had been granted approval from the new state legislature to build the University of Kansas in their town. Citizens needed to raise $15,000 to make this happen, and the raid had nearly wiped out everyone. Again, Amos Lawrence came to the rescue, digging into his pocket for $10,000 to make sure Lawrence, Kansas would become the home of the state university.

In 1884, Amos Lawrence finally visited the town that bore his name. Citizens rolled out the red carpet to honor their namesake. He was honored by the university he was instrumental in creating. He was invited as the guest of honor for several other events. But Lawrence had always been a very private person, and the hoopla over his visit was too much. He stayed for a couple of days, then returned home to Boston. He never visited again.

To the people of modern-day Lawrence, Amos Lawrence has faded from memory. A reporter writing about him in a recent local newspaper article was unaware that he had visited the town. But Lawrence’s support and money were essential in making Kansas a free state. When Lawrence responded to Burns’s brutal treatment, he showed how a citizen can be shocked out of complacency and into action—and thus made history.

The post The Bostonian Who Armed the Anti-Slavery Settlers in “Bleeding Kansas” appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.