What I wanted now to put before this committee was this: That I felt that my treatment was not exactly just, as
I had been accorded the right by two Commissions sent by the United
States to the Cherokee Nation to enroll the freedmen citizens of the Cherokee Nation— the John W.
Wallace and the Colonel Clifton Commissions. The testimony that I gave before those two Commissions sufficed to show that I was entitled to citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. I was rejected by the Dawes commission on that same testimony; not only myself but some two thousand others. Perhaps more. The Curtis Act provided against
us. I myself, with other freedmen whose cases are of the same nature as mine, met several honorable gentlemen of the Senate, some of them members of this committee, asking them to favor us when the bill came before them to enable us to prove that we were citizens of the Cherokee Nation."
Senate Report 5013 (59-1) Vol. 1 p205-207