The first convention was held in Middlebury, Vermont, home of William Slade, for years co-worked with John Quincy Adams in Congress. Yet in this town the opposition to the antislavery convention was intensely bitter and violent. Vermont boasted that within her borders no slave had ever been delivered up to a master, but the towns did not wish to be involved in “agitation.”
What was in this respect true of the Green Mountain State was most discouragingly true of New York, the next state they visited. All along the Erie canal, from Albany to Buffalo, they met with apathy, indifference, and sometimes the mob spirit. Syracuse refused to furnish church, market, house, or hall in which to hold the meetings. Mr. Stephen Smith, who had received the little group of speakers in his home, was sick with distress. Frederick, standing beside a wide window, looked out upon a park covered with young trees. He turned to his unhappy host.
“Don’t worry, my friend,” he said. “We’ll have our meeting.”
The next morning he took his stand under a tree in the southeast corner of this park and began to speak to an audience of five persons. Before the close of the afternoon he had before him not less than five hundred. In the evening he was waited upon by the officers of the Congregational church and tendered the use of an old wooden building which they had deserted for a better. Here the convention continued for three days.
In the growing city of Rochester their reception was more cordial. Gerrit Smith, Myron Holly, William Goodell and Samuel Porter were influential Abolitionists in the section. Frederick was to know the eccentric, learned and wealthy Gerrit Smith much better. Now he argued with him, upholding Garrison’s moral persuasion against Gerrit Smith’s ballot-box, as the weapon for abolishing slavery. From Rochester, Frederick and William Bradburn made their way to Buffalo, a rising city of steamboats, business and bustle. The Friends there had been able to secure for the convention only an old dilapidated and deserted room on a side-street, formerly used as a post-office. They went at the time appointed and found seated a few cabmen in their coarse, wrinkled clothes, whips in hand, while their teams were standing on the street waiting for a job.
Bradburn was disgusted. After an hour of what he considered futile talk and haranguing, he left. That evening he took the steamer to Cleveland. But Frederick stayed on. For nearly a week he spoke every day in the old post-office to constantly increasing audiences. Then a Baptist church was thrown open to him. The following Sunday he spoke in an open park to an assembly of several thousand persons.
In Richmond, Indiana, their meeting was broken up, and their clothes ruined with evil-smelling eggs. In Pendleton, Indiana, Frederick’s speaking schedule suffered a delay.
It had been found impossible to obtain a building in Pendleton in which to hold the convention. So a platform was erected in the woods at the edge of town. Here a large audience assembled and Frederick and his companion speaker, William A. White, were in high spirits. But hardly had they climbed to the stand when they were attacked by a mob of about sixty persons who, armed with clubs, picks and bricks, had come out to “kill the nigger!”
It was a furious but uneven fight. The Friends tried to protect Frederick, but they had no defense. White, standing his ground, pleaded with the ruffians and got a ferocious blow on the head, which cut his scalp and knocked him to the ground. Frederick had caught up a stick, and he fought with all his strength; but the mob beat him down, leaving him, they supposed, dead on the ground. Then they mounted their horses and rode to Anderson where, it was said, most of them lived.
Frederick lay on the ground at the edge of the woods, bleeding and unconscious. Neal Hardy, a Quaker, carried him to his cart and took him home. There he was bandaged and nursed. His right hand had been broken and never recovered its natural strength and dexterity. But within a few days he was up and on his way. His arm was in a sling but, as he remarked, the rest of him “little the worse for the tussle.”