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.” “A complete history of these hundred conventions would fill a volume far larger than the one in which this simple reference is to find place,” Frederick Douglass wrote many years later. “It would be a grateful duty to speak of the noble young men who forsook ease and pleasure, as did White, Gay and Monroe, and endured all manner of privations in the cause of the enslaved and down-trodden of my race.... Mr. Monroe was for many years consul to Brazil, and has since been a faithful member of Congress from Oberlin District, Ohio, and has filled other important positions in his state. Mr. Gay was managing editor of the _National Anti-Slavery Standard_, and afterward of the _New York Tribune_, and still later of the _New York Evening Post_.”[4] * * * * * The following winter, against the advice of his friends, Douglass decided on an independent course of action.