Is it a crime for a citizen to vote?
Susan B. Anthony was arrested on 18 November 1872 because she had voted at Rochester, New York, on 5 November, and the federal authorities charged her with voting unlawfully.
She had not slipped in unnoticed. She registered first, she voted openly, and once the case was brought she spent the months before trial arguing in public that the vote had been lawful. In that interval she delivered one speech, over and over, across the county: Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?
What happened between 5 November 1872 and June 1873
Between 5 November 1872 and June 1873 the sequence was short and each step was public.
- Voted at Rochester, New York, on 5 November 1872.
- Arrested on 18 November 1872 and charged with unlawful voting.
- Delivered the speech repeatedly across the county in the months before the trial.
- Tried in June 1873 at Canandaigua, before Justice Ward Hunt.
- Convicted on a verdict the judge directed, and fined one hundred dollars.
The third step is the one that gets left out of the summaries. The jury would be drawn from the men of the county, and she spent the months before her trial explaining her defense to them in advance, in every town that would give her a hall. What was actually said in those halls is on the record because the local papers reported it, which is the reason a speech given to small audiences in upstate New York is still readable.
The argument she made in the speech
The argument of the speech is constitutional, and it runs in four moves. First, the Constitution is established by the people of the United States, and women are people. Second, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, defines a citizen as any person born or naturalized in the country, which makes women citizens without qualification. Third, voting is a privilege belonging to citizens, and the same amendment forbids a state to abridge the privileges of citizens. Fourth, a state law that shuts citizens out of the ballot box on the ground of sex is therefore void, and acting on the Constitution against such a law is not a crime.
She had to meet the obvious counter, because it sat in the same amendment she was relying on. The Fourteenth Amendment had put the word male into the Constitution for the first time, in the clause used to count a state's voters for apportionment:
the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age
Her answer was that a penalty clause about apportionment is not a grant of the franchise to men and not a bar to women, and that the citizenship clause governs. The court never engaged with any of it.
How Justice Ward Hunt ended the trial at Canandaigua
Justice Ward Hunt ended the trial by taking it away from the jury. He directed a verdict of guilty rather than letting the jurors decide, which meant the argument Anthony had spent months putting in front of those men was never theirs to weigh. He then fined her one hundred dollars.
She never paid the fine, and Hunt did not commit her for refusing. That combination looks like leniency and was the opposite. A defendant held in custody for non payment would have had a route to a higher court. By convicting her, fining her and then leaving her at liberty, the court closed the case with no appealable order and no ruling on whether a woman citizen could vote. The constitutional question stayed shut until it was answered by amendment in 1920.
Which best explains her purpose in the speech
Her purpose in the speech was to win the case outside the courtroom, and to establish a claim of right rather than a plea for mercy. She did not argue that women deserved sympathy, that voting was a small thing to ask, or that she had made an innocent mistake. She argued that she had done something lawful and that the officials who arrested her had acted without authority. Three things follow from that choice:
- She addressed jurors, not judges, because the jury was where a citizen's reading of the Constitution could still prevail.
- She used the language of citizenship rather than the language of womanhood, which put the burden on the state to justify an exclusion.
- She treated the trial as publication, since every hall she spoke in produced a newspaper report that traveled further than the verdict.
What Susan B. Anthony did apart from voting in 1872
Susan B. Anthony, who lived from 1820 to 1906, was the organizer of the American suffrage campaign, working in partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who lived from 1815 to 1902, for longer than any of the organizations they built survived in one piece. They asked for it in writing in 1848, and it happened at Seneca Falls. The Declaration of Sentiments put the demand on paper there, and Anthony's share of the work afterward was the machinery: the conventions, the petitions, the tours, the newspapers and the state by state lobbying.
Her accomplishments are best read as a sequence of organizations. The American Equal Rights Association was formed in 1866 to seek the vote for Black men and for women together, and it broke apart in 1869. In May of that year Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association; the rival American Woman Suffrage Association followed in November of the same year. In the arguments around that split, Stanton and Anthony opposed the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, in explicitly racist terms, and they published those terms. The two associations merged in 1890 as the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Anthony died in 1906, fourteen years before the amendment that carries her campaign's demand was certified on 26 August 1920.