How did david ruggles die

The title of the only full-length biography of David Ruggles, written by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, sums up the essence of his relatively short life: “A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City.”^[1]  Even when he joined the utopian Northampton Association of Education and Industry later in his life, he continued his anti-slavery work and also became a healer, as a practitioner of the then-popular water cure.

Ruggles was born in Norwich, Connecticut in 1810 to a free Black family.  While Connecticut gradually abolished slavery in the late 1700s, it wasn’t formally ended until 1848.  Ruggles’ neighborhood life was fairly benign and integrated. His father was a blacksmith and his mother a caterer.  He was educated in religious charity schools, since there were no public schools for Black people at that time, and he became well educated and highly literate, clearly evidenced in his later writings. By 15, he left his large family and began work as a mariner, which exposed him to a larger worl

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