Frederick Douglass homes as "a labyrinth of secret panels and closets, where he secreted the poor human wretches from the man hunters and the blood-hounds, who were usually not far behind." Anti-abolitionism He stated that: "I know of no place in the Union where I could have located at the time with less resistance, or received a larger measure of sympathy and cooperation." However, on his arrival, he found "barriers erected against colored people in most places of instruction and amusement in the city, and until I went there they were imposed without any apparent sense of injustice and wrong." His daughter could not take classes with white girls. "The city felt no love for the negro, and although there were few of the race in Rochester, they were carefully segregated." Douglass delivered his fiery speech "The Meaning of July Fourth to the Negro" at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies Antislavery Association at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, on July 5, 1852. In 1857, Susan B. Anthony and William Lloyd Garrison spoke at an abolition meeting. In October, 1858, William H. Seward, a leading opponent of slavery, delivered a speech to an overflowing Republican crowd in Corinthian Hall. He argued that the political and economic systems of North and South were incompatible, famously saying that the "irrepressible conflict" between the two systems would eventually result in the nation becoming "either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation." Women's rights movement Rochester was involved with women's rights from an early date. The Rochester Women's Rights Convention, which met on August 2, 1848, was the second such convention in the nation. (The first was the Seneca Falls Convention, which met two weeks earlier in Seneca Falls, a town not far away.) The Rochester convention elected a woman as its presiding officer, a highly controversial step at the time that was opposed even by some of the meeting's leading participants. This convention was the first public meeting composed of both men and women in the U.S. to take that step. Susan B. Anthony, a national leader of the women's suffrage movement, was from Rochester. In a case that generated a national controversy, she was arrested for voting in Rochester in 1872, well before it was legal for women to vote. Her trial, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, was held in a federal circuit court presided over by a Supreme Court