Susan B. Anthony Part 25

Within a few days she appeared before the Federal Grand Jury in Albany and was indicted on the charge that she "did knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vote for a Representative in the Congress of the United States...."[296] Her trial was set for the term of the United States District Court, beginning May 13, 1873, in Rochester, New York.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Judge Henry R. Selden]

During these difficult days in Albany, Susan found comfort and courage, as in the past, in the friendliness of Lydia Mott's home.

Here she planned the steps by which to win public approval and financial aid for her test case. She addressed the commission which was revising New York's const.i.tution on woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pointing out that the law limiting suffrage to males was nullified by this new interpretation.

Eager to spread the truth about her own legal contest, she distributed printed copies of Judge Selden's argument. Then traveling to New York and Was.h.i.+ngton, she personally presented copies to newspaper editors and Congressmen. To one of these men she wrote, "It is not for myself--but for all womanhood--yes and all manhood too--that I most rejoice in the appeal to the legal mind of the Nation. It is no longer whether women wish to vote, or men are willing, but it is woman's Const.i.tutional right."[297]

In spite of the fact that Susan was technically in the custody of the United States Marshal, who objected to her leaving Rochester, she managed to carry out a full schedule of lectures in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and also the usual annual Was.h.i.+ngton and New York woman suffrage conventions at which she told the story of her voting, her arrest, and her pending trial, and where she received enthusiastic support.

Because she wanted the people to understand the legal points on which she based her right to vote, Susan spoke on "The Equal Right of All Citizens to the Ballot" in every district in Monroe County. So thorough and convincing was she that the district attorney asked for a change of venue, fearing that any Monroe County jury, sitting in Rochester, would be prejudiced in her favor. When her case was transferred to the United States Circuit Court in Canandaigua, to be heard a month later, she immediately descended upon Ontario County with her speech, "Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" and Matilda Joslyn Gage joined her, speaking on "The United States on Trial, Not Susan B. Anthony."

On the lecture platform Susan wore a gray silk dress with a soft, white lace collar. Her hair, now graying, was smoothed back and twisted neatly into a tight knot. Everything about her indicated refinement and sincerity, and most of her audiences felt this.

"Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and vote in making and executing the laws," she declared as she looked into the faces of the men and women who had gathered to hear her, farmers, storekeepers, lawyers, and housewives, rich and poor, a cross section of America.

Repeating to them salient pa.s.sages from the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Const.i.tution, she added, "It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens: but we the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people--women as well as men."[298]

She asked, "Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I think the disfranchised ex-rebels, and the ex-state prisoners will agree with me that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all the others are nothing."[299]

Quoting for them the Fifteenth Amendment, she told them it had settled forever the question of the citizen's right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment, she reasoned, applies to women, first because women are citizens and secondly because of their "previous condition of servitude." Defining a slave as a person robbed of the proceeds of his labor and subject to the will of another, she showed how state laws relating to married women had placed them in the position of slaves.

As she a.n.a.lyzed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and cited authorities for her conclusions, she left little doubt in the minds of those who heard her that women were persons and citizens whose privileges and immunities could not be abridged.

On this note she concluded: "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 ... We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for 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 const.i.tution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is const.i.tutional, everything against human rights unconst.i.tutional.' 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."

Speaking twenty-one nights in succession was arduous. "So few see or feel any special importance in the impending trial," she jotted down in her diary. In towns, such as Geneva, where she had old friends, like Elizabeth Smith Miller, she was a.s.sured of a friendly welcome and a good audience.[300]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "The Woman Who Dared"]

As the collections, taken up after her lectures, were too small to pay her expenses, her financial problems weighed heavily. The notes she had signed for _The Revolution_ were in the main still unpaid, and one of her creditors was growing impatient. She had recently paid her counsel, Judge Selden, $200 and John Van Voorhis, $75, leaving only $3.45 in her defense fund, but as usual a few of her loyal friends came to her aid, and both Judge Selden and John Van Voorhis, deeply interested in her courageous fight, gave most of their time without charge.[301]

If this campaign was a problem financially, it was a success in the matter of nation-wide publicity. The New York _Herald_ exulted in hostile gibes at women suffrage and published fict.i.tious interviews, ridiculing Susan as a homely aggressive old maid, but the New York _Evening Post_ prophesied that the court decision would likely be in her favor. The Rochester _Express_ championed her warmly: "All Rochester will a.s.sert--at least all of it worth heeding--that Miss Anthony holds here the position of a refined and estimable woman, thoroughly respected and beloved by the large circle of staunch friends who swear by her common sense and loyalty, if not by her peculiar views." In fact the consensus of opinion in Rochester was much like that of the woman who remarked, "No, I am not converted to what these women advocate. I am too cowardly for that; but I am converted to Susan B. Anthony."[302]

This, however, was far from the att.i.tude of Lucy Stone's _Woman's Journal_, which had ignored Susan's voting in November 1872 because it was out of sympathy with this militant move and with her interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Later, as her case progressed in the courts, the _Journal_ did give it brief notice as a news item, but in 1873 when it listed as a mark of honor the women who had worked wisely for the cause, Susan B. Anthony's name was not among them, and this did not pa.s.s unnoticed by Susan; nor did the fact that she was snubbed by the Congress of Women, meeting in New York and sponsored by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Maria Mitch.e.l.l. This drawing away of women hurt her far more than newspaper gibes. In fact she was sadly disappointed in women's response to the herculean effort she was making for them.

Even more disconcerting was the adverse decision of the Supreme Court on the Myra Bradwell case, which at once shattered the confidence of most of her legal advisors. The court held that Illinois had violated no provision of the federal Const.i.tution in refusing to allow Myra Bradwell to practice law because she was a woman and declared that the right to practice law in state courts is not a privilege or an immunity of a citizen of the United States, nor is the power of a state to prescribe qualifications for admission to the bar affected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, filing a dissenting opinion, lived up to Susan's faith in him, but Benjamin Butler wrote her, "I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Const.i.tution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens. But the difficulty is, the courts long since decided that the const.i.tutional provisions do not act upon the citizens, except as guarantees, ex proprio vigore, and in order to give force to them there must be legislation.... Therefore, the point is for the friends of woman suffrage to get congressional legislation."[303]

Susan, however, never wavered in her conviction that she as a citizen had a const.i.tutional right to vote and that it was her duty to test this right in the courts.

FOOTNOTES:

[288] Ray Strachey, _Struggle_ (New York, 1930), pp. 113-116.

[289] The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of a lower court that without specific legislation by Congress, the 14th Amendment could not overrule the law of the District of Columbia which limited suffrage to male citizens over 21. _History of Woman Suffrage_, II, pp. 587-601.

[290] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 423.

[291] Nov. 5, 1872, Ida Husted Harper Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. Miss Anthony had a.s.sured the election inspectors that she would pay the cost of any suit which might be brought against them for accepting women's votes.

[292] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 426. The Anthony home was then numbered 7 Madison Street.

[293] _An Account of the Proceedings of the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting_ (Rochester, New York, 1874), p. 16.

[294] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 428.

[295] _Ibid._, p. 433.

[296] _Trial_, pp. 2-3.

[297] N.d., Susan B. Anthony Papers, New York Public Library.

[298] _Trial_, pp. 151, 153. Judge Story, _Commentaries on the Const.i.tution of the United States_, Sec. 456: "The importance of examining the preamble for the purpose of expounding the language of a statute has long been felt and universally conceded in all juridical discussion." _History of Woman Suffrage_, II, p. 477.

[299] Harper, _Anthony_, II, pp. 978, 986-987.

[300] Ms., Diary, May 10, June 7, 1873.

[301] Suffrage clubs in New York, Buffalo, Chicago, and Milwaukee sent $50 and $100 contributions. Susan's cousin, Anson Lapham, cancelled notes for $4000 which she had signed while struggling to finance _The Revolution_. The women of Rochester rallied behind her, forming a Taxpayers' a.s.sociation to protest taxation without representation.

[302] Harper, _Anthony_, II, pp. 994-995.

[303] _Ibid._, I, p. 429.

"IS IT A CRIME FOR A CITIZEN ... TO VOTE?"

Charged with the crime of voting illegally, Susan was brought to trial on June 17, 1873, in the peaceful village of Canandaigua, New York.

Simply dressed and wearing her new bonnet faced with blue silk and draped with a dotted veil,[304] she stoically climbed the court-house steps, feeling as if on her shoulders she carried the political destiny of American women. With her were her counsel, Henry R. Selden and John Van Voorhis, her sister, Hannah Mosher, most of the women who had voted with her in Rochester, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose interest in this case was akin to her own.

In the courtroom on the second floor, seated behind the bar, Susan watched the curious crowd gather and fill every available seat. She wondered, as she calmly surveyed the all-male jury, whether they could possibly understand the humiliation of a woman who had been arrested for exercising the rights of a citizen. The judge, Ward Hunt, did not promise well, for he had only recently been appointed to the bench through the influence of his friend and townsman, Roscoe Conkling, the undisputed leader of the Republican party in New York and a bitter opponent of woman suffrage. She tried to fathom this small, white-haired, colorless judge upon whose fairness so much depended.

Prim and stolid, he sat before her, faultlessly dressed in a suit of black broadcloth, his neck wound with an immaculate white neckcloth.

He ruled against her at once, refusing to let her testify on her own behalf.

She was completely satisfied, however, as she listened to Henry Selden's presentation of her case. Tall and commanding, he stood before the court with n.o.bility and kindness in his face and eyes, bringing to mind a handsome cultured Lincoln. So logical, so just was his reasoning, so impressive were his citations of the law that it seemed to her they must convince the jury and even the expressionless judge on the bench.

Pointing out that the only alleged ground of the illegality of Miss Anthony's vote was that she was a woman, Henry Selden declared, "If the same act had been done by her brother under the same circ.u.mstances, the act would have been not only innocent and laudable, but honorable; but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime.... I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned in a criminal court, merely on account of her s.e.x."[305] He claimed that Miss Anthony had voted in good faith, believing that the United States Const.i.tution gave her the right to vote, and he clearly outlined her interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, declaring that she stood arraigned as a criminal simply because she took the only step possible to bring this great const.i.tutional question before the courts.

After he had finished, Susan followed closely for two long hours the arguments of the district attorney, Richard Crowley, who contended that whatever her intentions may have been, good or bad, she had by her voting violated a law of the United States and was therefore guilty of crime.

At the close of the district attorney's argument, Judge Hunt without leaving the bench drew out a written doc.u.ment, and to her surprise, read from it as he addressed the jury. "The right of voting or the privilege of voting," he declared, "is a right or privilege arising under the const.i.tution of the State, not of the United States.[306]