David Ruggles, June 19, 1841

David Ruggles is one of the great civil rights heroes and the inspiration for sustained nonviolent protest as it is still practiced today. Time is short today, so I must leave you with no more than Ruggles’s own account of what happened to him on this day 184 years ago.

Having been defrauded in 1838 on the steamboat Rhode Island, David Ruggles is perhaps even more outraged when it happens to him again during the active summer of 1841. Writing with his usual fervor, Ruggles sets out the details of another encounter during a trip from New Bedford to Nantucket Island on June 19th:

NEW BEDFORD, June 23d, 1841.

To the Editor of the New Bedford Daily Register :—

SIR,— Permit me to inquire of your readers, what is Highway Robbery? and if the following outrage is not Robbery, and Assault and Battery. I left New Bedford on Saturday last, the 19th inst., on board the Steamboat Telegraph, for Nantucket.* On the passage thither, when called upon to pay the fare, I stepped forward to the Captain's office, and inquired the price of the passage. I learned that there were two prices; one $2, the other $1 50. The passenger who pays the first price is entitled to all the privileges of the Boat. The one who pays the second price purchases a forward deck privilege. I concluded to pay $2, which the Capt. repeatedly refused to take, and insisted on my purchasing the forward deck privilege, which I did not choose to take, on the grounds, first, no man or body corporate has a right to decide for another person what he or she shall purchase; second, no man can justly compel another to pay for what he does not want. The Capt. became furious at my position, commenced an assault and battery upon my person, took from me by force my private papers. Finding myself ‘a stranger in a strange place,’ shorn of hat and important papers, I was compelled to leave the Island without accomplishing the object of my visit; on my return passage, Capt. Lot Phinney received $2 fare. I state these facts to caution the public, who may travel in the Steamboat between New Bedford and Nantucket.

                                                                        Yours for Equal Rights,

                        DAVID RUGGLES.

* “Inst.” is an abbreviation of Latin instante mense, meaning “(a date) of the present month.”

The Telegraph in Nantucket Harbor, 1852