Susan B. Anthony Casts a Ballot

A Lifetime of Agitation

By 1872, Anthony had been fighting for one cause or another for most of her adult life.

She was raised a Quaker, in a family that believed in hard work, plain living, and that men and women were equal in the eyes of God. As a young woman she taught school. She worked against alcohol abuse. She campaigned to end slavery.

In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the two became partners for the next half century. Stanton was the writer and the thinker. Anthony was the organizer. She crossed the country giving speeches and gathering petitions, sleeping in drafty boarding houses, and taking ridicule from newspapers everywhere she went.

After the Civil War, she hoped the new amendments to the Constitution would include women. They did not. The Fifteenth Amendment protected the vote from being denied because of race. It said nothing about sex.

That split the movement. Some reformers said this was the moment to secure the vote for Black men, and women would have to wait their turn. It was a painful fight among old allies. Anthony and Stanton refused to wait. In 1868 they started a newspaper called The Revolution. In 1869 they founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, with one goal above all: a vote for women, written into the Constitution.

But Anthony had spotted something already in the Constitution. What if women didn't need a new amendment at all? What if they already had the vote, and just had to use it?

The Barbershop and the Ballot

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, said that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. And it said no state could take away the privileges of citizens.

So here was the argument. Women are persons. Women born here are citizens. Voting is a privilege of citizenship. Therefore, women can vote.

On November 1st, 1872, Anthony put that to the test. She walked into a voter registration office in Rochester with three of her sisters, Guelma, Hannah, and Mary. The office was set up in a barbershop.

The young men running it did not know what to do. Anthony read them the Fourteenth Amendment. She told them that if they refused her, she would hold them responsible. In the end, they registered all four sisters.

Here's what a sailor recognizes in that barbershop. A few young men with a rulebook, facing a problem the rulebook never imagined.

Word spread. Within days, more Rochester women registered too.

On Tuesday, November 5th, Election Day, Susan B. Anthony walked into her polling place in Rochester's Eighth Ward and cast her ballot. Other Rochester women voted too. It was a presidential year. Ulysses S. Grant was running for a second term.

That same day, she wrote to Stanton. "Well I have been and gone and done it!!" She had voted the straight Republican ticket that morning.

For about two weeks, nothing happened.

Then, on November 18th, a deputy United States marshal came to her house on Madison Street. By Anthony's own account, he was polite, even a little embarrassed. But she was under arrest.

So were fourteen other women who had voted, and the election inspectors who had let them. The charge was a federal crime: voting in a federal election without the legal right to vote. It was a law passed after the Civil War to stop voter fraud in the South.

Only one of those women would be tried. The government saw Anthony as the leader, and the test case. In January of 1873, an all-male grand jury indicted her.

She was going to get her day in court. She was not going to get to speak in it.

The Trial

Anthony didn't wait quietly. In the months before the trial, she traveled to towns all over Monroe County with a speech that asked one pointed question. Was it a crime for a citizen of the United States to vote?

She was so persuasive that the prosecutor worried no local jury would convict her. Therefore, the trial moved to the federal court in the next county seat, Canandaigua.

It opened in June of 1873, and newspapers across the country sent reporters. The judge was Ward Hunt. He had just been appointed to the Supreme Court, and like the justices of that era, he also heard cases out in the circuit courts.

Her lawyer, Henry Selden, argued for hours. Anthony honestly believed she had the right to vote, he said, so she could not have knowingly broken the law.

Anthony herself said nothing. She couldn't. Under the rules of that court, a woman was not considered competent to testify, not even in her own case. The prisoner never stood up to speak.

Then Judge Hunt did something remarkable. He didn't let the jury decide. He told the jurors the law was clear, and he directed them to find her guilty. Selden objected and asked that the jurors be polled, one by one. The judge refused and dismissed them.

The jurors had heard the whole case. Not one of them was ever asked what he thought.

It looked like the government had won without a fight. But Judge Hunt had one more formality to get through, and it gave her an opening. He had to ask her a question.

One Hundred Dollars

Which brings us back to that courtroom, and Hunt's question. Had the prisoner anything to say?

"Yes, your honor, I have many things to say," she began, "for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government."

She said she'd been denied the right of consent as one of the governed, and denied a trial by a jury of her peers. Every man in that jury box, she said, was her political superior, so not one of them was her peer.

Hunt cut in. "The prisoner must sit down. The Court cannot allow it."

She kept going. She reminded him that since her arrest, this was the first time she'd been allowed a word of defense before judge or jury.

"The Court orders the prisoner to sit down. It will not allow another word."

She kept going. She told him she asked no leniency at his hands, but rather the full rigors of the law.

I spent my Navy years in a world built on orders. Stand up. Sit down. What strikes me is that Hunt had the power and the robe and the last word, and he still couldn't make her stop.

"The Court must insist," he said. And at last, she sat down.

Then he spoke again. "The prisoner will stand up."

She rose. And Judge Hunt pronounced the sentence. "The sentence of the Court is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution."

Susan B. Anthony answered him directly.

"May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty."

And she never did.

Here's the twist. Hunt didn't order her held until she paid. If he had, she could have carried her case all the way to the Supreme Court. Instead, the fine simply sat there, unpaid. The government never collected a cent.

The Anthony Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment door closed anyway. In 1875, in a Missouri suffragist's case, Minor versus Happersett, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that citizenship alone did not carry the right to vote.

So the Constitution itself would have to change. In 1878, Senator Aaron Sargent of California introduced an amendment to bar voting discrimination based on sex. People called it the Susan B. Anthony Amendment. It failed, again and again.

Weeks before she died, at her eighty-sixth birthday celebration, Anthony told the crowd that failure is impossible. She died in Rochester in March of 1906.

Congress passed her amendment on June 4th, 1919. On August 18th, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify it. The right of citizens to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of sex.

Why It Matters

As a Navy veteran, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. That oath means more when you remember ordinary citizens can change it, if they refuse to quit. Anthony never paid that hundred dollars. She paid in other ways, her whole life.

She rests in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester. And on Election Day, people stand in line at her grave, to press their I Voted stickers onto her headstone.

Tomorrow: landing boats stop dead on a coral reef, hundreds of yards from the beach at Tarawa. How do the Marines get ashore? The Daily Muster is supported by Parcaut Supply Co. If this one stayed with you, subscribe, and tomorrow's will be waiting. Muster's done. Fair winds. I'm Ed Parcaut, and I'll see you tomorrow.