The election of 2000 was not the first time that America voted for president and then settled back to watch the trials. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony, for the only time in her life, voted in a federal election–“the straight Republican ticket,” she revealed to her close friend and fellow suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Two weeks later, a federal marshal showed up at Stanton’s Rochester home and arrested her on the charge of illegal voting in a congressional election.

The Anthony trial of 1873 helped answer the important question of whether women as “citizens” under the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment were entitled, as one of the “privileges and immunities” that came with citizenship, to vote. The answer given by prim and conservative Justice Ward Hunt will surprise few, but the trial also shows Hunt with his hands full, not quite knowing how to shut up his feisty defendant. Read now about what “Aunt Susan” described in her diary as “the greatest outrage in judicial history!”

Douglas Linder
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
linderd@umkc.edu
February, 2001

More than any other woman of her generation, Susan
B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American
women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. 
When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman’s rights convention in
Syracuse in 1852, she declared “that the right which woman needed above
every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was
the right of suffrage.”  Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of
her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving
speeches, petitioning Congress and state legislatures, publishing a feminist
newspaper–all for a cause that would not succeed until the ratification
of the Nineteenth
Amendment fourteen years after her death in 1906.

She would, however, once have the satisfaction of seeing her completed
ballot drop through the opening of a ballot box.  It happened in Rochester,
New York on November 5, 1872, and the event–and the trial for illegal
voting that followed–would create a opportunity for Anthony to spread
her arguments for women suffrage to a wider audience than ever before.

The Vote

Anthony had been planning to vote long before 1872.  She would
later state that “I have been resolved for three years to vote at the first
election when I had been home for thirty days before.” (New York law required
legal voters to reside for the thirty days prior to the election in the
district where they offered their vote.)  Anthony had taken the position–and
argued it wherever she could–that the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment
gave women the constitutional right to vote in federal elections. The Amendment
said that “all persons born and naturalized in the United States…are
citizens of the United States,” and as citizens were entitled to the “privileges”
of citizens of the United States.  To Anthony’s way of thinking, those
privileges certainly included the right to vote.

On November 1, 1872, Anthony and her three sisters entered a voter registration
office set up in a barbershop.  The four Anthony women were part of
a group of fifty women Anthony had organized to register in her home town
of Rochester.  As they entered the barbershop, the women saw stationed
in the office three young men serving as registrars.  Anthony walked
directly to the election inspectors and, as one of the inspectors would
later testify, “demanded that we register them as voters.”

The election inspectors refused Anthony’s request, but she persisted,
quoting the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship provision and the article
from the New York Constitution pertaining to voting, which contained no
sex qualification.  The registers remained unmoved.  Finally,
according to one published account, Anthony gave the men an argument that
she thought might catch their attention: “If you refuse us our rights as
citizens, I will bring charges against you in Criminal Court and I will
sue each of you personally for large, exemplary damages!” She added, “I
know I can win.  I have Judge
Selden as a lawyer. There is any amount of money to back me, and if
I have to, I will push to the ‘last ditch’ in both courts.”

The stunned inspectors discussed the situation.  They sought the
advice of the Supervisor of elections, Daniel Warner, who, according to
thirty-three-year old election inspector E. T. Marsh, suggested that they
allow the women to take the oath of registry.  “Young men,” Marsh
quoted Warner as saying, “do you know the penalty of law if you refuse
to register these names?” Registering the women, the registrars were advised,
“would put the entire onus of the affair on them.”  Following Warner’s
advice, the three inspectors voted to allow Anthony and her three sisters
were registered to vote in Rochester’s eighth ward.  Testifying later
about the registration process, Anthony remembered “it was a full hour”
of debate “between the supervisors, the inspectors, and myself.” In all,
fourteen Rochester women successfully registered that day, leading to calls
in one city paper for the arrest of the voting inspectors who complied
with the women’s demand.  The Rochester Union and Advertiser
editorialized in its November 4 edition: “Citizenship no more carries the
right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon…If these women
in the Eighth Ward offer to vote, they should be challenged, and if they
take the oaths and the Inspectors receive and deposit their ballots, they
should all be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Soon after the polls opened at the West End News Depot on Election Day,
November 5, Anthony and seven or eight other women cast their ballots. 
Inspectors voted two to one to accept Anthony’s vote, and her folded ballot
was deposited in a ballot box by one of the inspectors. Inspector E. T.
Marsh testified later as to feeling caught between a rock and a hard place:
“Decide which way we might, we were liable to prosecution. We were expected…to
make an infallible decision, inside of two days, of a question in which
some of the best minds of the country are divided.” Seven or eight more
women of Rochester successfully voted in the afternoon.  Anthony’s
vote went to U. S. Grant and other Republicans, based on that party’s promise
to give the demands of women a respectful hearing.  Later that day,
Anthony would write of her accomplishment to her close friend and fellow
suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

Dear Mrs Stanton

   Well I have been & gone & done it!!–positively
voted the Republican ticket–strait this a.m. at 7 Oclock–& swore
my vote in at that–was registered on Friday….then on Sunday others some
20 or thirty other women tried to register, but all save two were refused….Amy
Post was rejected & she will immediately bring action for that….&
Hon Henry R. Selden will be our Counsel–he has read up the law & all
of our arguments & is satisfied that we our right & ditto the Old
Judge Selden–his elder brother.  So we are in for a fine agitation
in Rochester on the question–I hope the morning’s telegrams will tell
of many women all over the country trying to vote–It is splendid that
without any concert of action so many should have moved here so impromptu–

The Democratic paper is out against us strong & that scared the
Dem’s on the registry board–How I wish you were here to write up the funny
things said & done….When the Democrat said my vote should not go
in the box–one Republican said to the other–What do you say Marsh?–I
say put it in!–So do I said Jones–and “we’ll fight it out on this line
if it takes all winter”….If only now–all the women suffrage women would
work to this end of enforcing the existing constitution–supremacy of national
law over state law–what strides we might make this winter–But I’m awful
tired–for five days I have been on the constant run–but to splendid purpose–So
all right–I hope you voted too.

Affectionately,

Susan B. Anthony

Arrest and Indictment

The votes of Susan Anthony and other Rochester women was a major topic
of conversation in the days that followed.  In a November
11 letter to Sarah Huntington, Anthony wrote: “Our papers are discussing
pro & con everyday.”  Anthony occupied much of her time meeting
with lawyers to discuss a planned lawsuit by some of the women whose efforts
to register or vote were rejected.

Meanwhile, a Rochester salt manufacturer and Democratic poll watcher
named Sylvester Lewis filed a complaint charging Anthony with casting an
illegal vote.  Lewis had challenged both Anthony’s registration and
her subsequent vote.  United States Commissioner William C. Storrs
acted upon Lewis’s complaint by issuing a warrant for Anthony’s arrest
on November 14.  The warrant charged Anthony with voting in a federal
election “without having a lawful right to vote and in violation of section
19 of an act of Congress” enacted in 1870, commonly called The Enforcement
Act.  The Enforcement Act carried a maximum penalty of $500 or three
years imprisonment.

The actual arrest of Anthony was delayed for four days to allow time
for Storrs to discuss the possible prosecution with the

U. S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York.  On November
18, a United States deputy marshal showed up at the Anthony home on Madison
Street in Rochester, where he was greeted by one of Susan’s sisters. 
At the request of the deputy, Anthony’s sister summoned Susan to the parlor. 
Susan Anthony had been expecting her visitor.  As Anthony would later
tell audiences, she had previously received word from Commissioner Storrs
“to call at his office.”  Anthony’s response was characteristically
plainspoken: “I sent word to him that I had no social acquaintance with
him and didn’t wish to call on him.”

At the May meeting of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, Anthony
described what happened when the deputy marshal, “a young man in beaver
hat and kid gloves (paid for by taxes gathered from women),” came to see
her:

He sat down.  He said it was pleasant weather.  He
hemmed and hawed and finally said Mr. Storrs wanted to see me….”what
for?” I asked.  “To arrest you.” said he.  “Is that the way you
arrest men?” “No.”  Then I demanded that I should be arrested properly. 
[According to another account, Anthony at this point held out her wrists
and demanded to be handcuffed.] My sister desiring to go with me he proposed
that he should go ahead and I follow with her.  This I refused, and
he had to go with me.  In the [horse-drawn] car he took out his pocketbook
to pay fare.  I asked if he did that in his official capacity. 
He said yes; he was obliged to pay the fare of any criminal he arrested. 
Well, that was the first cents worth I ever had from Uncle Sam.

Anthony was escorted to the office of Commissioner Storrs, described by
Anthony as “the same dingy little room where, in the olden days, fugitive
slaves were examined and returned to their masters.”  Upon arriving,
Anthony was surprised to learn that among those arrested for their activities
on November 5 were not only the fourteen other women voters, but also the
ballot inspectors who had authorized their votes.

Anthony’s lawyers refused to enter a plea at the time of her arrest,
and Storrs scheduled a preliminary examination for November 29.  At
the hearing on the 29th, complainant Sylvestor Lewis and Eighth Ward Inspectors
appeared as the chief witnesses against Anthony.  Anthony was questioned
at the hearing by one of her lawyers, John Van Voorhis.  Van Voorhis
tried to establish through his questions that Anthony believed that she
had a legal right to vote and therefore had not violated the 1870 Enforcement
Act, which prohibited only willful and knowing illegal votes.  Anthony
testified that she had sought legal advice from Judge Henry R. Selden prior
to casting her vote, but that Selden said “he had not studied the question.” 
Van Voorhis asked: “Did you have any doubt yourself of your right to vote?” 
Anthony replied, “Not a particle.”  Storrs adjourned the case to December
23.

After listening to legal arguments in December, Commissioner Storrs
concluded that Anthony probably violated the law.  When Anthony–alone
among those charged with Election Day offenses–refused bail, Storrs ordered
her held in the custody of a deputy marshal until the grand jury had a
chance to meet in January and consider issuing an indictment.  Anthony
saw the commissioner’s decision as a ticket to Supreme Court review, and
began making plans with her lawyers to file a petition for a writ of habeas
corpus.  In a December 26 letter, Anthony wrote confidently, “We shall
be rescued from the Marshall hands on a Writ of Habeas Corpus–& case
carried to the Supreme Court of the U. S.–the speediest process of getting
there.”  Already letters were coming in with contributions to her
“Defense Fund.”  She was anxious to put the money to use.

By early January, Anthony was already trying to make political hay out
of her arrest.  She sent off “hundreds of papers” concerning her arrest
to suffragist friends and politicians.  She still, however, found
her situation difficult to comprehend: “I never dreamed of the U. S. officers
prosecuting me for voting–thought only that if I was refused I should
bring action against the inspectors– But “Uncle Sam” waxes wroth with
holy indignation at such violation of his laws!!”

Anthony’s attorney, Henry Selden asked a U. S. District Judge in Albany,
Nathan Hall, to issue a writ of habeas corpus ordering the release of Anthony
from the marshal’s custody. Hall denied Selden’s request and said he would
“allow defendant to go to the Supreme Court of the United States.” 
The judge then raised Anthony’s bail from $500 to $1000. Anthony again
refused to pay.  Selden, however, decided to pay Anthony’s bail with
money from his own bank account.  In the courtroom hallway following
the hearing Anthony’s other lawyer, John Van Voorhis, told Anthony that
Selden’s decision to pay her bail meant “you’ve lost your chance to get
your case before the Supreme Court.”  Shaken by the news, Anthony
confronted her lawyer, demanding that he explain why he paid her bail. 
“I could not see a lady I respected put in jail,” Selden answered.

A disappointed Anthony still had a trial to face.  On January 24,
1873, a grand jury of twenty men returned an indictment
against Anthony charging her with “knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully”
voting for a member of Congress “without having a lawful right to vote,….the
said Susan B. Anthony being then and there a person of the female sex.” 
The trial was set for May.

On the Stump

Anthony saw the four months until her trial as an opportunity to educate
the citizens of Rochester and surrounding counties on the issue of women
suffrage.  She took to the stump, speaking in town after town on the
topic, “Is
it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?”

By mid-May, Anthony’s exhausting lecture tour had taken her to every
one of the twenty-nine post-office districts in Monroe County.  To
many in her audience, Anthony was the picture of “sophisticated refinement
and sincerity.”  The fifty-two-year-old suffragist delivered her earnest
speeches dressed in a gray silk dress a white lace collar.  Her smoothed
hair was twisted neatly into a tight knot.  She would look at her
audience, ranging from a few dozen to over a hundred persons, and begin:

Friends and Fellow-citizens: I stand before you to-night, under
indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential
election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this
evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime,
but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s right, guaranteed to me and
all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power
of any State to deny.

In her address, Anthony quoted the Declaration of Independence, the U.
S. Constitution, the New York Constitution, James Madison, Thomas Paine,
the Supreme Court, and several of the leading Radical Republican senators
of the day to support her contention that women had a legal right as citizens
to vote.  She argued that natural law, as well as a proper interpretation
of the Civil War Amendments, gave women the power to vote, as in this passage
suggesting that women, having been in a state of servitude, were enfranchised
by the recently enacted Fifteenth Amendment extending the vote to ex-slaves:

And yet one more authority; that of Thomas Paine, than whom
not one of the Revolutionary patriots more ably vindicated the principles
upon which our government is founded:

“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right
by which other rights are protected. To take away this right is to reduce
man to a state of slavery; for slavery consists in being subject to the
will of another; and he that has not a vote in the election of representatives
is in this case….”

Is anything further needed to prove woman’s condition of servitude sufficiently
orthodox to entitle her to the guaranties of the fifteenth amendment? Is
there a man who will not agree with me, that to talk of freedom without
the ballot, is mockery–is slavery–to the women of this Republic, precisely
as New England’s orator Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war,
declared it to be to the newly emancipated black men?

Anthony ended her hour-long lectures by frankly attempting to influence
potential jurors to vindicate her in her upcoming trial:

We appeal to the women everywhere to exercise their too long
neglected “citizen’s right to vote.” We appeal to the inspectors of elections
everywhere to receive the votes of all United States citizens as it is
their duty to do. We appeal to United States commissioners and marshals
to arrest the inspectors who reject the names and votes of United States
citizens, as it is their duty to do, and leave those alone who, like our
eighth ward inspectors, perform their duties faithfully and well.

We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of “guilty” against honest,
law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes
at our elections. Or against intelligent, worthy young men, inspectors
of elections, for receiving and counting such citizens votes.

We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law,
and wherever there is room for a doubt to give its benefit on the side
of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that “the true rule of
interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments,
is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against
human right unconstitutional.”

And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot-all
peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when
all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law.

Anthony’s lecture tour plainly worried her prosecutor, U. S. Attorney Richard
Crowley. In a letter to Senator Benjamin F. Butler, Anthony wrote, “I have
just closed a canvass of this county–from which my jurors are to be drawn–and
I rather guess the U. S. District Attorney–who is very bitter–will hardly
find twelve men so ignorant on the citizen’s rights–as to agree on a verdict
of Guilty.”  In May, however, Crowley convinced
Judge Ward Hunt (the recently appointed justice of the U. S. Supreme
Court who would hear Anthony’s case) that Anthony had prejudiced potential
jurors, and Hunt agreed to move the trial out of Monroe County to Canandaigua
in Ontario County.  Hunt set a new opening date for the trial of June
17.

Anthony responded to the judge’s move by immediately launching a lecture
tour in Ontario County.  Anthony spoke for twenty-one days in a row,
finally concluding her tour in Canandaigua, the county seat, on the night
before the opening of her trial.

The Trial

Going into the June trial, Anthony and her lawyers were somewhat less
optimistic about the outcome than they had been a few months before. 
In April, the U. S. Supreme Court handed down its first two major interpretations
of the recently enacted Civil War Amendments, rejected the claimed violations
in both cases and construing key provisions narrowly.  Of special
concern to Anthony was the Court’s decision in Bradwell vs. Illinois,
where the Court had narrowly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal
protection clause to uphold a state law that prohibited women from becoming
lawyers.  In an April 27 letter, Anthony anxiously sought out Benjamin
Butler’s views of the decision, noting that “The whole Democratic press
is jubilant over this infamous interpretation of the amendments.”

Even without the Supreme Court’s narrow interpretation of the amendments,
many observers expressed skepticism about the strength of Anthony’s case. 
An editorial in the New York Times concluded:

“Miss Anthony is not in the remotest degree likely to gain
her case, nor if it were ever so desirable that women should vote, would
hers be a good case.  When so important a change in our Constitution
as she proposes is made, it will be done openly and unmistakably, and not
left to the subtle interpretation of a clause adopted for a wholly different
purpose.”

In a lengthy response to the Times editorial, Elizabeth
Cady Stanton quoted Judge Selden as confidently telling Anthony, “there
is law enough not only to protect you in the exercise of your right to
vote, but to enfranchise every woman in the land.”

On June 17, 1873, Anthony, wearing a new bonnet faced with blue silk
and draped with a veil, walked up the steps of the Canandaigua
courthouse on the opening day of her trial.  The second-floor
courtroom was filled to capacity.  The spectators included a former
president, Millard Fillmore, who had traveled over from Buffalo, where
he practiced law.  Judge Ward Hunt sat behind the bench, looking stolid
in his black broadcloth and neck wound in a white neckcloth.  Anthony
described Hunt as “a small-brained, pale-faced, prim-looking man, enveloped
in a faultless black suit and a snowy white tie.”

Richard Crowley made the opening
statement for the prosecution:

We think, on the part of the Government, that there is no question
about it either one way or the other, neither a question of fact, nor a
question of law, and that whatever Miss Anthony’s intentions may have been-whether
they were good or otherwise-she did not have a right to vote upon that
question, and if she did vote without having a lawful right to vote, then
there is no question but what she is guilty of violating a law of the United
States in that behalf enacted by the Congress of the United States.

The prosecution’s chief witness was Beverly W. Jones, a twenty-five-year-old
inspector of elections.   Jones
testified that he witnessed Anthony cast a ballot on November 5 in
Rochester’s Eighth Ward.  Jones added he accepted Anthony’s completed
ballot and placed it a ballot box.  On cross-examination, Selden asked
Jones if he had also been present when Anthony registered four days earlier,
and whether objections to Anthony’s registration had not been considered
and rejected at that time.  Jones agreed that was the case, and that
Anthony’s name had been added to the voting rolls.

The main factual argument that the defense hoped to present was that
Anthony reasonably believed that she was entitled to vote, and therefore
could not be guilty of the crime of “knowingly” casting an illegal vote. 
To support this argument, Henry Selden called himself as a witness to testify:

Before the last election, Miss Anthony
called upon me for advice, upon the question whether she was or was not
a legal voter. I examined the question, and gave her my opinion, unhesitatingly,
that the laws and Constitution of the United States, authorized her to
vote, as well as they authorize any man to vote.

Selden then called Anthony as a witness, so she might
testify as to her vote and her state of mind on Election Day.  District
Attorney Crowley objected: “She is not a competent as a witness on her
own behalf.”  Judge Hunt sustained the objection, barring Anthony
from taking the stand.  The defense rested.

The prosecution called to the stand John Pound,
an Assistant United States Attorney who had attended a January examination
in which Anthony testified about her registration and vote.  Pound
testified that Anthony testified at that time that she did not consult
Selden until after registering to vote.  Selden, after conferring
with Anthony, agreed that their meeting took place immediately after her
registration, rather than before as his own testimony had suggested. 
On cross-examination, Pound admitted that Anthony had testified at her
examination that she had “not a particle” of doubt about her right as a
citizen to vote.  With Pound’s dismissal from the stand, the evidence
closed and the legal arguments began.

Selden opened his three-hour-long argument
for Anthony by stressing that she was prosecuted purely on account
of her gender:

If the same act had been done by her
brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only
innocent, but honorable and laudable; but having been done by a woman it
is said to be a crime. The crime therefore consists not in the act done,
but in the simple fact that the person doing it was a woman and not a man,
I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned
in a criminal court, merely on account of her sex….

Selden stressed that the vote was essential to women
receiving fair treatment from legislatures: “Much has been done, but much
more remains to be done by women. If they had possessed the elective franchise,
the reforms which have cost them a quarter of a century of labor would
have been accomplished in a year.”

Central to Selden’s argument that Anthony cast
a legal vote was the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment:

It will be seen, therefore, that the
whole subject, as to what should constitute the “privileges and immunities”
of the citizen being left to the States, no question, such as we now present,
could have arisen under the original constitution of the United States.
But now, by the fourteenth amendment, the United States have not only declared
what constitutes citizenship, both in the United States and in the several
States, securing the rights of citizens to “all persons born or naturalized
in the United States;” but have absolutely prohibited the States from making
or enforcing ” any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities
of citizens of the United States.”  By virtue of this provision, I
insist that the act of Miss Anthony in voting was lawful.

Finally, Selden insisted that even if the Fourteenth
Amendment did not make Anthony’s vote legal, she could not be prosecuted
because she acted in the good faith belief that her vote was legal:

Miss Anthony believed, and was advised
that she had a right to vote. She may also have been advised, as was clearly
the fact, that the question as to her right could not be brought before
the courts for trial, without her voting or offering to vote, and if either
was criminal, the one was as much so as the other. Therefore she stands
now arraigned as a criminal, for taking the only steps by which it was
possible to bring the great constitutional question as to her right, before
the tribunals of the country for adjudication. If for thus acting, in the
most perfect good faith, with motives as pure and impulses as noble as
any which can find place in your honor’s breast in the administration of
justice, she is by the laws of her country to be condemned as a criminal,
she must abide the consequences. Her condemnation, however, under such
circumstances, would only add another most weighty reason to those which
I have already advanced, to show that women need the aid of the ballot
for their protection.

After District Attorney Crowley offered his two-hour
response for the prosecution, Judge Hunt drew from his pocket a paper and
began reading an opinion that he had apparently prepared before the trial
started.  Hunt declared, “The Fourteenth Amendment gives no
right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation
of the law.”  The judge rejected Anthony’s argument that her good
faith precluded a finding that she “knowingly” cast an illegal vote: “Assuming
that Miss Anthony believed she had a right to vote, that fact constitutes
no defense if in truth she had not the right. She voluntarily gave a vote
which was illegal, and thus is subject to the penalty of the law.” 
Hunt that surprised Anthony and her attorney by directing a verdict of
guilty: “Upon this evidence I suppose there is no question for the jury
and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty.”

In her diary that night Anthony would angrily describe the trial as
“the greatest judicial outrage history has ever recorded! We were convicted
before we had a hearing and the trial was a mere farce.”  During the
entire trial, as Henry Selden pointed out,  “No juror spoke a word
during the trial, from the time they were impaneled to the time they were
discharged.”  Had the jurors had an opportunity to speak, there is
reason to believe that Anthony would not have been convicted.  A newspaper
quoted one juror as saying, “Could I have spoken, I should have answered
‘not guilty,’ and the men in the jury box would have sustained me.”

Sentencing

The next day Selden
argued for a new trial on the ground that Anthony’s constitutional
right to a trial by jury had been violated.  Judge Hunt promptly denied
the motion.  Then, before sentencing, Hunt asked, “Has the prisoner
anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?”  The exchange
that followed stunned the crowd in the Canandaigua courthouse:

“Yes, your honor, I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict
of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government.
My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights,
are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship,
I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not
only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict,
doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.”

Judge Hunt interrupted, “The Court cannot listen to a rehearsal of arguments
the prisoner’s counsel has already consumed three hours in presenting.”

But Anthony would not be deterred.  She continued, “May it please
your honor, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons
why sentence cannot, in justice, be pronounced against me. Your denial
of my citizen’s right to vote, is the denial of my right of consent as
one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of
the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers as an
offender against law, therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life,
liberty, property and-”

“The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on.”

“But your honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of
protest against this high-handed outrage upon my citizen’s rights. May it please the Court to remember that
since the day of my arrest last November, this is the first time that either myself or any person of my disfranchised class has been
allowed a word of defense before judge or jury-”

“The prisoner must sit down-the Court cannot allow it.”

“All of my prosecutors, from the eighth ward corner grocery politician,
who entered the compliant, to the United States Marshal, Commissioner,
District Attorney, District Judge, your honor on the bench, not one is
my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to
the jury, as was clearly your duty, even then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer;
but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, awake or asleep, sober or drunk, each and every
man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer. Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England,
tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men.
Even my counsel, the Hon. Henry R. Selden, who has argued my cause so ably, so earnestly, so unanswerably before your
honor, is my political sovereign. Precisely as no disfranchised person is entitled to sit upon a jury, and no woman is
entitled to the franchise, so, none but a regularly admitted lawyer is allowed to practice in the courts, and no woman can gain
admission to the bar-hence, jury, judge, counsel, must all be of the superior class.

“The Court must insist-the prisoner has been tried according to the
established forms of law.”

“Yes, your honor, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by
men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women; and hence, your honor’s ordered verdict of
guilty; against a United States citizen for the exercise of “that citizen’s right to vote,” simply because that citizen was a woman
and not a man. But, yesterday, the same man made forms of law, declared it a crime punishable with $1,000 fine and six
months imprisonment, for you, or me, or you of us, to give a cup of cold water, a crust of bread, or a night’s shelter to a panting
fugitive as he was tracking his way to Canada. And every man or woman in whose veins coursed a drop of human sympathy violated
that wicked law, reckless of consequences, and was justified in so doing. As then, the slaves who got their freedom
must take it over, or under, or through the unjust forms of law, precisely so, now, must women, to get their right to a voice in
this government, take it; and I have taken mine, and mean to take it at every possible opportunity.”

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

“When I was brought before your honor for trial, I hoped for a broad
and liberal interpretation of the Constitution and its recent amendments,
that should declare…equality of rights the national guarantee to all
persons born or naturalized in the United States. But failing to get this
justice-failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers-I ask not
leniency at your hands-but rather the full rigors of the law–”

“The Court must insist-”

Finally, Anthony sat down, only to be immediately ordered by Judge Hunt
to rise again.  Hunt pronounced sentence: “The sentence of the Court
is that you pay a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of the prosecution.”

Anthony protested. “May it please your honor, I shall never pay a dollar
of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt,
incurred by publishing my paper- The Revolution -four years ago,
the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I
have done, rebel against your manmade, unjust, unconstitutional forms of
law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation
in the government; and I shall work on with might and main to pay every dollar of that honest debt, but not a penny shall
go to this unjust claim. And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition
of the old revolutionary maxim, that “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.”

Judge Hunt, in a move calculated to preclude any appeal to a higher
court, ended the trial by announcing, “Madam, the Court will not order
you committed until the fine is paid.”

Epilogue

True to her word, Anthony never paid a penny of her fine.  Her
petition
to Congress to remit the fine was never acted upon, but no serious
effort was ever made by the government to collect.

Anthony tried to turn her trial and conviction into political gains
for the women suffrage movement.  She ordered 3,000 copies of the
trial
proceedings printed and distributed them to political activists, politicians,
and libraries.  In the eyes of some, the trial had elevated Anthony
to the status of the martyr, while for others the effect may have been
to diminish her status to that of a common criminal.  Many in the
press, however, saw Anthony as the ultimate victor.  On New York paper
observed, “If it is a mere question of who got the best of it, Miss Anthony
is still ahead.  She has voted and the American constitution has survived
the shock.  Fining her one hundred dollars does not rule out the fact
that…women voted, and went home, and the world jogged on as before.”