The Genius of America by Eric Lane

Author:Eric Lane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

SUSAN B. ANTHONY IS ARRESTED

FOR VOTING

When Susan B. Anthony entered the parlor of her home in Rochester, New York, to greet the federal deputy marshal, she knew he had come to arrest her. Her crime? As stated in the arrest warrant: “Without having a lawful right to vote in said election district the said Susan B. Anthony, being then and there a person of the female sex . . . did knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vote.” On November 5, 1872, she had entered the polling place in Rochester’s Eighth Ward, convinced the inspectors of her right to vote (she had convinced them of her right to register several days earlier) and cast her ballot for the Republican Ulysses S. Grant and the rest of the Republican ticket, whom she judged were most sympathetic to women’s rights. “Well I have been & gone & done it!!—positively voted the Republican ticket,” she would write her friend and ally Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Anthony believed she did have a lawful right to vote. She and many others found it in the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment. The magistrate hearing her case did not agree. After her arrest, he required the posting of bail, which Anthony refused to do. So she was held. This was a part of her strategy, not a sign of her poverty. Anthony had plenty of money available to her to secure her freedom. Rather, she wanted to be held so she could bring her case directly to the Supreme Court under the rules of habeas corpus. This would allow a national test of the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote. But her lawyer, Henry Selden, a former judge on New York’s highest court and supporter of women’s suffrage, posted bond for her without her approval. In a triumph of gallantry over political stratagem, he would later explain, “I could not see a lady I respected put in jail.”

But despite her anger over her lawyer’s act, she used her case to publicize the issue of women’s suffrage. In her writing and speaking she would ask the simple question of whether an American should be arrested for voting in a presidential election. Anthony brought all the strands of thinking from the revolutionary era together. She offered arguments from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the writings of Thomas Paine and James Madison, asking her audience to see the denial of suffrage as slavery. She was speaking for history but also to influence potential jurors. “The only alleged ground of illegality of the defendant’s vote is that she is a woman,” her defense argued.

There is evidence her campaign was working. First prosecutors moved the case to find a less influenced jury pool. Then, when the trial was held, Justice Ward Hunt, in a very unusual and probably unconstitutional move, refused to let the jury decide the case, finding her guilty himself. Depriving the jury of the opportunity to decide Anthony’s case again underscores the extent to which those with power are unwilling to share it.

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