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and when this became too small I went on Sunday into the open Park and addressed an assembly of four or five thousand persons. After this my colored friends, Charles L. Remond, Henry Highland Garnet,†Editorial Emendation: Garnett Theodore S. Wright, Amos G. Beman,†Editorial Emendation: Beaman. Charles B. Ray,†Editorial Emendation: Charles M. Ray. and other well-known colored men, held a convention here,† National Convention of Colored Men began in Buffalo on 15 August 1843, consisting of about seventy-five delegates. The president pro tem, Samuel H. Davis of Buffalo, gave the opening speech. The subjects of temperance, self-improvement, education, plans for a national Negro press, and especially abolition received the most attention. Howard Holman Bell, A Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 1830-1861 (New York, 1969), 70, 76. and then Remond and myself left for our next meeting in Clinton†Editorial Emendation: Second American Edition. First Printing Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing Co., et al., 1882: Chester. county, Ohio.†As part of the One Hundred Conventions tour of the western states by Garrisonian abolitionists, Douglass and Charles L. Remond addressed the annual meeting of the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society on 4 September 1843 at Oakland, Clinton County, Ohio. The easterners arrived after the formal meeting had concluded, but an audience of nearly a thousand was gathered in only two hours to hear Douglass and Remond. Hamm, God`s Government Begun, 96; Douglas A. Gamble, "Moral Suasion in the West: Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1831-1861" (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1973), 278-81. This was held under a great shed, built by the abolitionists, of whom Dr. Abram Brooke†Editorial Emendation: Brook. and Valentine Nicholson were the most noted, for this special purpose. Thousands gathered here and were addressed by Bradburn, White, Monroe, Remond, Gay, and myself. The influence of this meeting was deep and wide-spread. It would be tedious to tell of all, or a small part of all that was interesting and illustrative of the difficulties encountered by the early advocates of anti-slavery in connection with this campaign, and hence I leave this part of it at once.
From Ohio we divided our forces and went into Indiana. At our first meeting we were mobbed, and some of us got our good clothes spoiled by evil-smelling eggs. This was at Richmond,†After the end of the Ohio State Anti-Slavery Society convention in Oakland, Ohio, the touring Garrisonians split into two groups to lecture in more Indiana communities during mid-September 1843. The team of Douglass, George Bradburn, and William A. White was scheduled to hold antislavery meetings in Cambridge City, New Castle, Liberty, Pendleton, Jonesboro, and Richmond, all in east-central Indiana, where large numbers of Quakers had settled. Douglass misremembers the itinerary, having his famous confrontation with a violent antiabolitionist mob in Pendleton on 16 September and getting egged in Richmond on 28 September 1843. Hamm, God`s Government Begun, 96-101; Gamble, "Moral Suasion in the West," 278-81. where Henry Clay had been recently invited to the high seat of the Quaker meeting-house just after his gross abuse of Mr. Mendenhall,†During a 1 October 1842 political visit to Richmond, Indiana, the prominent Kentucky Whig Henry Clay had been embarrassed before an audience of several thousand supporters when a small group of local Quakers led by Hiram Mendenhall (1801-52) presented him a petition signed by over 2,000, asking him to denounce slavery and colonization. Clay responded by admonishing Mendenhall and the Friends with him "to go home and mind their own business." This incident outraged Clay's political allies, including many prominent Quakers, who had Mendenhall and several others expelled from leadership positions in their local meetings. Mendenhall had migrated from North Carolina with his family in childhood and settled in southwestern Ohio. A farmer, Mendenhall moved farther west into Indiana in the mid-1830s and prospered. He was originally a Whig in politics, but his abolitionist principles led him to the Liberty party by the time of his confrontation with Clay. Hamm, God`s Government Begun, 50-56; Ryan Jordan, "The Indiana Separation of 1842 and the Limits of Quaker Anti-Slavery," Quaker History, 89:2-3 (Spring 2000); Gamble, "Moral Suasion in the West," 221-24. because of his presenting him a respectful petition, asking him to emancipate his slaves. At Pendleton this mobocratic spirit was even more pronounced.†A mob attacked Douglass in Pendleton, Madison County, Indiana, on the morning of 16 September 1843. The previous day, Douglass, William A. White, and George Bradburn had spoken at Pendleton's Baptist church, despite rumors and threats from an excited "mob of thirty or more people," many of whom were "very much intoxicated." The next morning, with law-and-order resolutions posted prominently throughout the town, Douglass and his colleagues addressed an outdoor meeting on the wooded banks of nearby Fall Creek, where local Quakers had set up makeshift seats and stands. Menacing hecklers set upon the abolitionist trio, demolishing the speakers' platform and attacking its occupants. The mob then focused its wrath on Douglass, pursuing and severely beating him. The bleeding and unconscious Douglass was taken to the farm of Mr. and Mrs. Neal Hardy, a Quaker couple, who treated Douglass's broken right hand and other injuries. Because the bones were not properly set, the hand never regained its "natural strength and dexterity." NASS, 18 September, 19 October 1843; Lib., 13 October 1843; Mary Howitt, "Memoir of Frederick Douglass," People`s Journal, 2:302 -05 (November 1846); R[obert] C.Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad (1883; New York, 1969), 187-88; Samuel Harden, comp., History of Madison County, Indiana: From 1820 to 1874 (Markleville, Ind., 1874), 203-05; John L. Forkner and Byron H. Dyson, eds., Historical Sketches and Reminiscences of Madison County (Anderson, Ind., 1897), 749-53; J. J. Netterville, Centennial History of Madison County, Indiana, 2 vols. (Anderson, Ind., 1925), 1:321-22; Lloyd Lewis, "Quaker Memories of Frederick Douglass," Negro Digest, 5:37-41 (September 1947). It was found impossible to obtain a building in which to hold our convention, and our friends, Dr. Fussell†On his way to the Diennial Convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, held in Philadelphia on 4-7 December 1843, Douglass lectured in Pittsburgh and several other Pennsylvania towns. No record exists of the warnings that Douglass remembers having received while on this tour. His reference to a Dr. Fussell is probably to either Bartholomew Fussell of York, Pennsylvania, or Edwin Fussell of Pendleton, Indiana, both Hicksite Quakers and physicians. Bartholomew Fussell was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. His nephew Edwin (?-1882) was a Garrisonian abolitionist who had braved a mob in Pendleton when he had hosted Douglass in his home the previous September. In 1844 Edwin moved to the Philadelphia area, where he continued to practice medicine. NASS, 14 December 1843; Lib., 15, 22 December 1843; Frederic May Holland, Frederick Douglass: The Colored Orator (New York, 1891), 95-96. and others, erected a platform in the woods, where quite a large audience assembled. Mr. Bradburn, Mr. White, and myself were in attendance. As soon as we began to speak a mob of about sixty of the roughest characters I ever looked upon ordered us, through its leaders, to "be silent," threatening us, if we were not, with violence. We attempted to dissuade them, but they had not come to parley but to fight, and were well armed. They tore down the platform on which we stood, assaulted Mr. White and, knocking out several of his teeth, dealt a heavy blow on the back†Editorial Emendation: blow on William A. White, striking him on the back part of the head, badly cutting his scalp and felling him to the ground. Undertaking to fight my way through the crowd with a stick which I caught up in the mélée,†Editorial Emendation: mêlee I attracted the fury of the mob, which laid me prostrate on the ground under a torrent of blows. Leaving me thus, with my right hand hroken, and in a state of unconsciousness, the mobocrats hastily mounted their horses and rode to Andersonville,†Douglass misidentifies Anderson, Indiana, the county seat of Madison County, located twelve miles northeast of Pendleton. Despite the presence of several Quaker settlements, Madison County had a strong antiabolitionist reputation in the early 1840s. Hamm, God`s Government Begun, 97-98. where most of them resided. I was soon raised up and revived by Neal Hardy, a kind-hearted member of the Society of Friends, and carried by him in his wagon about three miles in the country to his home, where I was tenderly nursed and bandaged by good Mrs. Hardy till I was again on my feet, but as the bones broken were not properly set my hand has never recovered its natural
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