David Ruggles, Puritan

“licentiousness of intercourse between the sexes, constant, incestuous, and universal.”** Part of a distinctive anti-slavery campaign, Bourne and Ruggles had similar goals, but there is little to suggest Bourne as the author of both pamphlets.

Born in Connecticut, Ruggles had as much right to claim a “Puritan” perspective as any other native New Englander. As a child, he attended a school sponsored by the Congregational Church. When he moved to New York City, he joined the First Colored Presbyterian Church. It is also possible that the pseudonym referred to Puritan laws regulating sexual behavior, but many of these laws existed in southern states as well. Establishing their common heritage, Ruggles addressed Abrogation to his “Fellow Christians,” urging readers to use “evangelical weapons” to fight slavery. Like later abolitionist come-outers, Ruggles believed the church, from the pulpit to the pew, condoned slavery.  “The house of prayer,” he wrote, “should no longer be the den of thieves and adulterers.” Southern ladies were criminal accomplices to this system, so he turned to Northern women, “by the lofty honor of your sex, by your sympathies as women, by your character as wives, mothers, and sisters, and by the imperative claims of ‘pure religion and undefiled.’” Their evangelical weapon? “Not to company with fornicators” (1st Corinthians, v. 9-13). Ruggles recommended two actions. First, female parishioners should sign a protest against the presence of any slaveholder in their church. Second, if their protest was not heeded, and a slave-owning visitor appeared, they should immediately exit the building. He believed their actions would not only purify the northern church, but bring slavery to an end. In contrast to the current invisibility of sexual sins under slavery, Ruggles urged women to use their moral example “to indelibly brand this system of female violation, adultery, incest, bigamy, concubinage, and polygamy…with its own infamous names.”

Did Ruggles’s pseudonym make a difference? While his pamphlet addressed a topic of personal and political importance to white female abolitionists, they ignored it. Instead, Hodges writes, Ruggles found an enthusiastic audience in African American women organized in uplift and literary societies. As part of a larger campaign, however, An Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment places Ruggles at the center of a movement intent on appealing to Christian women. To overcome differences of race and sex, Ruggles relied on his religious upbringing, which placed him, with whites, in a familiar landscape of American history. Thus linked by their shared New England religion, Ruggles differentiated this true Christianity from the false religion of slaveholders–and challenged them to uphold it. 

*Carol Lasser, “Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Anti-Slavery Rhetoric,” Journal of the Early Republic 28 (Spring 2008): 83-114.