ht to limit the suffrage, if they think it
will secure the best interest of the State?

FRANCES D. GAGE said: I have but little to say because it is
almost two o'clock, and hungry and weary people are not good
listeners to speeches. I shall confine my remarks therefore to
one special point brought up this morning and not fully
discussed. Sojourner Truth gave us the whole truth in about
fifteen words: "If I am responsible for the deeds done in my
body, the same as the white male citizen is, I have a right to
all the rights he has to help him through the world." I shall
speak for the slave woman at the South. I have always lifted my
voice for her when I have spoken at all. I will not give up the
slave woman into the hands of man, to do with her as he pleases
hereafter. I know the plea that was made to me in South Carolina,
and down in the Mississippi valley. They said, "You give us a
nominal freedom, but you leave us under the heel of our husbands,
who are tyrants almost equal to our masters." The former slave
man of the South has learned his lesson of oppression and wrong
of his old master; and they think the wife has no right to her
earnings. I was often asked, "Why don't the Government pay my
wife's earnings to me?" When acting for the Freedman's Aid
Society, the orders came to us to compel marriage, or to separate
families. I issued the order as I was bound to do, as General
Superintendent of the Fourth Division under General Saxton. The
men came to me and wanted to be married, because they said if
they were married in the church, they could manage the women, and
take care of their money, but if they were not married in the
church the women took their own wages and did just as they had a
mind to. But the women came to me and said, "We don't want to be
married in the church, because if we are our husbands will whip
the children and whip us if they want to; they are no better than
old masters." The biggest quarrel I had with the colored people
down there, was with a plantation man because I would not furnish
a nurse for his child. "No, Nero," said I, "I can not hire a
nurse for your child while Nancy works in the cotton field." "But
what is we to do? I'se a poor miserable man and can't work half
the time, and Nancy is a good strong hand; and w