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334 We are now trying for liberty that requires no blood— that women shall have their rights, not rights from you. Give them what belongs to them. — sojourner truth chapter 18 “Was Woman True?” sojourner, suffrage, and civil rights I Sojourner Truth joined the newly revived woman’s movement, which had been quiet during the war in the interest of national solidarity. Indeed, in 1863, women had organized the National Woman’s Loyal League to support the Union and collect a million signatures advocating a Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Funded by the AASS, the league’s paid female agents branched throughout the North and West but delivered only four hundred thousand signatures to Congress. Garrison’s private comment that the league was more of a woman’s rights organization was not far off the mark. League auxiliaries became the nexus for a postwar suffrage movement and propelled Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony into national leadership.1 Sojourner Truth wholeheartedly advocated woman’s suffrage. Eventually however, she had to choose between prioritizing race and gender. “I suppose,” she said in 1866, “I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored woman.” Although a few other black women activists supported the movement, none rivaled her in consistency and visibility. “My Dear Friend,” Susan B. Anthony wrote Sojourner Truth in Sojourner, Suffrage, and Civil Rights 335 January 1866, “I know you will be glad to put your mark to the enclosed petition and get a good many to join it, and send or take it to some member of Congress to present.”2 This petition, drawn up by Anthony, Stanton, and Lucy Stone—a self-appointed , ad hoc National Woman’s Rights Committee—challenged using the word “male” in the proposed amendment to the Constitution. Such wording, Anthony wrote Sojourner, would shut out “all women from voting for president, vice-president, and congressmen, even though they may have the right to vote in the state for state officers.” The petition praised pending legislation guaranteeing citizenship to all “persons” born in the United States (except untaxed Indians) and granting them equality before the law. Yet the bill specifically used the words he, his, and him. “I know Sojourner Truth will say, ‘No’ to this atrocious exclusion,” Anthony wrote. “God bless you, and help you to do the good work before you.”3 Sojourner did not attend the 1866 annual spring meetings at which the AASS argued heatedly over dissolution. Douglass led virtually all African Americans in adamantly objecting to dissolving the organization. The AASS, Frances Watkins Harper argued, should help blacks create “a level playing field.” Most whites agreed. The sensational young newcomer Anna Dickinson thundered against dissolution and the white North’s amazing apathy. Abby Kelley Foster, visibly ill but eloquent, spoke about the recent Memphis riots. “When in all the rural districts of the South, men, women, and children are held, worked and treated as slaves, I contend that we have not freedom. When some hundred people, assembled at a hall, were attacked by a gang of white men . . . women killed, and others worse than killed—and nothing done to punish the fearful crimes, who will say the Negro is free?” She vowed that only when black men obtained protection and suffrage would she vote to dissolve. Garrison, now almost a Republican centrist, resigned and dissolved the Liberator; Oliver Johnson and Maria Chapman Weston also resigned. But the rank and file voted overwhelmingly to remain active. Wendell Phillips accepted the presidency of the society, and Aaron Powell assumed Johnson’s editorship of the Standard. Sojourner sent thanks and blessings to friends for “what they have done for me and my people.” Yet the nation still owed a big debt to the freed people, who remained in great need.4 Abolitionists then attended the National Woman’s Rights Convention, which passed a resolution to become the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) and met a few weeks later in Boston. Participants united behind a universal suffrage agenda; several male Abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, were AERA vice presidents. Sojourner was not there, but the press noted that Frances Watkins Harper was “witty, pathetic, and dramatic—giving fragments of her experience as both a woman and [member] of the proscribed race.” Wendell Phillips declared his support for woman’s suffrage and protested against all efforts to introduce the word “male” into the proposed amendment to the Constitution. [18.188.66.13] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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