A beacon for black freedom in antebellum America, David Ruggles (1810-49) championed self-sacrifice, direct confrontation, and community mobilizing to carve a path of militant, practical abolitionism. So argues Hodges (history; Colgate Univ.; Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863). His five chapters, introduction, and epilog move Ruggles from childhood in Connecticut to the center of radical abolitionism in New York City and through a too early public retirement forced by ill health, which prompted him to study medicine and open a water-cure spa in Massachusetts. Hodges details Ruggles's undaunted struggles to secure black liberty, particularly by protecting fugitives from slave snatchers. He also discusses Ruggles's indefatigable writings, which challenged public anti-Negro prejudices and advanced equal rights for blacks and women. Reviving and expanding historian Dorothy Porter's pioneering African American bibliographic work and Benjamin Quarles's 1969 classic Black Abolitionists, Hodges contributes to a better understanding of antebellum black activism and to shaping a fresh synthesis regarding how abolitionism shook America to its core. VERDICT Essential for readers and scholars interested in antebellum America, the antislavery movement, black activists, or New York City history.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Hodges, a historian of US abolitionism, skillfully weaves the life of abolitionist David Ruggles into the larger history of black abolitionists. Born to free parents in Connecticut, his journalistic and pamphleteering work struck at the heart and conscience of abolitionism in the US. Hodges (Colgate Univ.) convincingly argues that historians should reconfigure Ruggles from the margins to the center of abolitionist studies. Long overshadowed by his white counterparts, such as William Lloyd Garrison, or the celebrated runaway slave Frederick Douglas in the historiography of US abolitionism, Ruggles preceded both of these figures. He directly inspired the latter, worked tirelessly as the head of the New York Committee of Vigilance to protect fugitive slaves and free blacks from kidnapping, played a strategic role in the Underground Railroad long before Harriett Tubman and William Sill, and urged his more conservative colleagues toward radical abolitionism. He often experienced legal hassles, personal debt, mob violence, internecine rivalries and jealousies, and physical ailments. Hodges reminds readers that Ruggles's most enduring legacy was his refusal to accept the status quo of free blacks in the antebellum US and his inspirational influence on the generation of abolitionists that followed him. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. M. S. Hill Gordon College