Susan B. Anthony, 1871Susan B. Anthony, 1871
Some of Susan's' critics at home felt she was again besmirching the suffrage cause by setting foot in polygamous Utah, but this was of no moment to her, for she saw the crying need of the right kind of missionary work among Mormon women, "no Phariseeism, no shudders of Puritanic horror, ... but a simple, loving fraternal clasp of hands with these struggling women" to encourage them and point the way.
Hearing that Susan and Mrs. Stanton were in the West en route to California, Leland Stanford, Governor of California and president of the recently completed Central Pacific Railway, sent them passes for their journey. They reached San Francisco with high hopes that they could win the support of western men for theirdemand for woman suffrage under the Fourteenth Amendment. Their welcome was warm and the press friendly. An audience of over 1,200 listened with real interest to Mrs. Stanton. Then the two crusaders made a misstep. Eager to learn the woman's side of the case in the recent widely publicized murder of the wealthy attorney, Alexander P. Crittenden, by Laura Fair, they visited Laura Fair in prison. Immediately the newspapers reported this move in a most critical vein, with the result that an uneasy audience crowded into the hall where Susan was to speak on "The Power of the Ballot." As she proceeded to prove that women needed the ballot to protect themselves and their work and could not count on the support and protection of men, she cited case after case of men's betrayal of women. Then bringing home her point, she declared with vigor, "If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight."[270]
Boos and hisses from every part of the hall greeted this statement; but Susan, trained on the antislavery platform to hold her ground whatever the tumult, waited patiently until this protest subsided, standing before the defiant audience, poised and unafraid. Then, in a clear steady voice, she repeated her challenging words. This time, above the hisses, she heard a few cheers, and for the third time she repeated, "If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight."
Now the audience, admiring her courage, roared its applause. "I declare to you," she concluded, "that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and here I take my stand."
Reading the newspapers the next morning, she found herself accused not only of defending Laura Fair, but of condoning the murder of Crittenden. This story was republished throughout the state and eagerly picked up by New York newspapers.
As it was now impossible for her or for Mrs. Stanton to draw a friendly audience anywhere in California, they took refuge in the Yosemite Valley for the next few weeks. Susan was inconsolable. These slanders on top of the loss ofThe Revolutionand the split in the suffrage ranks seemed more than she could bear. "Never inall my hard experience have I been under such fire," she confided to her diary. "The clouds are so heavy over me.... I never before was so cut down."[271]
Not until she had spent several days riding horseback in the Yosemite Valley on "men's saddles" in "linen bloomers," over long perilous exhausting trails, did the clouds begin to lift. Gradually the beauty and grandeur of the mountains and the giant redwoods brought her peace and refreshment, putting to flight "all the old six-days story and the 6,000 jeers."
Bearing the brunt of the censure in California, Susan expected Mrs. Stanton to come to her defense in letters to the newspapers. When she did not do so, Susan was deeply hurt, for in the past she had so many times smoothed the way for her friend. Even now, on their return to San Francisco, where she herself did not yet dare lecture, she did her best to build up audiences for Mrs. Stanton and to get correct transcripts of her lectures to the papers. Disillusioned and heartsick, she was for the first time sadly disappointed in her dearest friend.
Moving on to Oregon to lecture at the request of the pioneer suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who had left for the East, "As I rolled on the ocean last week feeling that the very next strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my sins of omission and commission, there was nothing undone which haunted me like the failure to speak the word at San Francisco again and more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having said the true and needful thing on Laura Fair and the social evil, with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from their united eulogies with that one word unsaid."[272]
So far Susan's western trip had netted her only $350. This was disappointing in so far as she had counted upon it to reduce substantially herRevolutiondebt. She now hoped to build her earnings up to $1,000 in Oregon and Washington. Everywhere in these two states people took her to their hearts and the press with a few exceptions was complimentary. The beauty of the rugged mountainous country compensated her somewhat for the long tiringstage rides over rough roads and for the cold uncomfortable lonely nights in poor hotels. Only occasionally did she enjoy the luxury of a good cup of coffee or a clean bed in a warm friendly home.
At first in Oregon she was apprehensive about facing an audience because of her San Francisco experience, and she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "But to the rack I must go, though another San Francisco torture be in store for me."[273]She spoke on "The Power of the Ballot," on women's right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, on the need of women to be self-supporting, and clearly and logically she marshaled her facts and her arguments. Occasionally she obliged with a temperance speech, or gathered women together to talk to them about the social evil, relieved when they responded to this delicate subject with earnestness and gratitude. Practice soon made her an easy, extemporaneous speaker. Yet she was only now and then satisfied with her efforts, recording in her diary, "Was happy in a real Patrick Henry speech."[274]
The proceeds from her lectures were disappointing, as money was scarce in the West that winter, and she had just decided to return to the East to spend Christmas with her mother and sisters when she was urged to accept lecture engagements in California. Putting her own personal longings behind her, she took the stage to California, sitting outside with the driver so that she could better enjoy the scenery and learn more about the people who had settled this new lonely overpowering country. "Horrible indeed are the roads," she wrote her mother, "miles and miles of corduroy and then twenty miles ... of black mud.... How my thought does turn homeward, mother."[275]
This time she was warmly received in San Francisco. The prejudice, so vocal six months before, had disappeared. "Made my Fourteenth Amendment argument splendidly," she wrote in her diary. "All delighted with it and me—and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that I help the good work on."[276]
She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, "I miss Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhaustedmagazine. There is no alternative—whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her."[277]
Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, "6 months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's work full 13,000 miles travel—170 meetings." On the train she met the new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. "This is indeed a fearful ordeal, fastened here ... midway of the continent at the top of the Rocky mountains," she recorded. "The railroad has supplied the passengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing mothers."[278]The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed heartily in woman's rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for the Senate had boldly announced his endorsement of woman suffrage.
This friendly attitude among western men toward votes for women was the most encouraging development in Susan's long uphill fight. These men, looking upon women as partners who had shared with them the dangers and hardships of the frontier, recognized at once the justice of woman suffrage and its benefit to the country.
Susan traveled directly from Nevada to Washington instead of breaking her journey by a visit with her brothers in Kansas, as she had hoped to do. She even omitted Rochester so that she might be in time for the national woman suffrage convention in Washington in January 1872, for which Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Stanton were preparing. She found Victoria Woodhull with them, her presence provoking criticism and dissension.
Impulsively she came to Victoria's defense at the convention:"I have been asked by many, 'Why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front?' Now, bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her Memorial to Congress and it was a power.... She had an interview with the judiciary committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was young, handsome, and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after."[279]
"I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs. Woodhull's antecedents," she continued. "I said I didn't and that I did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of Congress.... I have been asked along the Pacific coast, 'What about Woodhull? You make her your leader?' Now we don't make leaders; they make themselves."
Victoria, however, did not prove to be the leading light of this convention, although she made one of her stirring fiery speeches calling upon her audience to form an Equal Rights party and nominate her for President of the United States. By this time, Susan had concluded that Victoria Woodhull for President did not ring true and she would have nothing to do with her self-inspired candidacy. Quickly she steered the convention away from Victoria Woodhull for President toward the consideration of the more practical matter of woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. "At the close of the war," Susan reminded the Senators, "Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed ... we rushed to you with petitions praying you not to insert the word 'male' in the second clause. Our best friends ... said to us: 'The insertion of that word puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarrass us but wait until we get the Negro question settled.' So the Fourteenth Amendment with the word 'male' was adopted.[280]
"When the Fifteenth was presented without the word 'sex,'" she continued, "we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance tous, and again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war, saying, 'After we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your case.'
"Have they done as they promised?" she asked. "When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men say to us ... to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void the word 'male' in the Fourteenth and supply the want of the word 'sex' in the Fifteenth. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a bloody revolution...."
Unconvinced of the urgency or even the desirability of votes for women, the Senate judiciary committee promptly issued an adverse report, but Susan was assured that her cause had a few persistent supporters in Congress when Benjamin Butler presented petitions to the House for a declaratory act for the Fourteenth Amendment and Congressman Parker of Missouri introduced a bill granting women the right to vote and hold office in the territories.
Susan now turned to the more sympathetic West to take her plea for woman suffrage directly to the people. Speaking almost daily in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, she had little time to think of the work in the East; the glamor of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality who gave only part of herself to the task.
When letters came from Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker showing plainly that they were falling in with Victoria's plans to form a new political party, Susan at once dashed off these lines of warning: "We have no element out of which to make a political party, because there is not a man who would vote a woman suffrage ticket if thereby he endangered his Republican, Democratic, Workingmen's, or Temperance party, and all our time and words in that direction are simply thrown away. My name must not be used to call any such meeting."[281]
Then she added, "Mrs. Woodhull has the advantage of us because she has the newspaper, and she persistently means to runour craft into her port and none other. If she were influenced by women spirits ... I might consent to be a mere sail-hoister for her; but as it is she is wholly owned and dominated bymenspirits and I spurn the whole lot of them...."
A few weeks later, as she looked over the latest copy ofWoodhull & Claflin's Weekly, she was horrified to find her name signed to a call to a political convention sponsored by the National Woman Suffrage Association. Immediately she telegraphed Mrs. Stanton to remove her name and wrote stern indignant letters begging her and Mrs. Hooker not to involve the National Association in Victoria Woodhull's presidential campaign. Although she herself had often called for a new political party while she was publishingThe Revolution, she was practical enough to recognize that a party formed under Victoria Woodhull's banner was doomed to failure.
Returning to New York, she found both Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker still completely absorbed in Victoria's plans. Bringing herself up to date once more on the latest developments in the colorful life of Victoria Woodhull, she found that she had been lecturing on "The Impending Revolution" to large enthusiastic audiences and that she had again been called into court by her family. Goaded to defiance by an increasingly virulent press, Victoria had also begun to blackmail suffragists who she thought were her enemies, among them Mrs. Bullard, Mrs. Blake, and Mrs. Phelps. This made Susan take steps at once to free the National Association of her influence.
When Victoria Woodhull, followed by a crowd of supporters, sailed into the first business session of the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York, announcing that the People's convention would hold a joint meeting with the suffragists, Susan made it plain that they would do nothing of the kind, as Steinway Hall had been engaged for a woman suffrage convention. With relief, she watched Victoria and her flock leave for a meeting place of their own. Disgruntled at what she called Susan's intolerance, Mrs. Stanton then asked to be relieved of the presidency. Elected to take her place, Susan was now free to cope with Victoria, should this again become necessary.
Not to be outmaneuvered by Susan, Victoria made a surprise appearance near the end of the evening session and moved that the convention adjourn to meet the next morning in Apollo Hall withthe people's convention. Quickly one of her colleagues seconded the motion. Susan refused to put this motion, standing quietly before the excited audience, stern and somber in her steel-gray silk dress. Beside her on the platform, Victoria, intense and vivid, put the motion herself, and it was overwhelmingly carried by her friends scattered among the suffragists. Declaring this out of order because neither Victoria nor many of those voting were members of the National Association, Susan in her most commanding voice adjourned the convention to meet in the same place the next morning. Victoria, however, continued her demands until Susan ordered the janitor to turn out the lights. Then the audience dispersed in the darkness.
With these drastic measures, Susan rescued the National Woman Suffrage Association from Victoria Woodhull, who had her own triumph later at Apollo Hall, where, surrounded by wildly cheering admirers, she was nominated for President of the United States by the newly formed Equal Rights party.
Reading about Victoria's nomination in the morning papers, Susan breathed a prayer of gratitude for a narrow escape, recording in her diary, "There never was such a foolish muddle—all come of Mrs. S. [Stanton] consulting and conceding to Woodhull & calling a People's Con[vention].... All came near being lost.... I never was so hurt with the folly of Stanton.... Our movement as such is so demoralized by letting go the helm of ship to Woodhull—though we rescued it—it was as by a hair breadth escape." She was surprised to find no condemnation of her actions inWoodhull & Claflin's Weeklybut only the implication that the suffragists were too slow for Victoria's great work.[282]
The attitude of some of the leading suffragists toward Victoria Woodhull remained a problem. Fortunately Mrs. Stanton came back into line, but both Mrs. Hooker and Mrs. Davis seemed bound to drift under Victoria's influence, and the promising young lawyer, Belva Lockwood, campaigned for the Equal Rights party and its candidate Victoria Woodhull.
While Victoria Woodhull's fortunes were speedily dropping from the sublime heights of a presidential nomination to the humiliation of financial ruin, the loss of her home, and the suspended publicationof herWeekly, Susan was knocking at the doors of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. She had previously appealed to the liberal Republicans, among whose delegates were her old friends George W. Julian, B. Gratz Brown, and Theodore Tilton, but they had ignored woman suffrage and had nominated for President, Horace Greeley, now a persistent opponent of votes for women. The Democrats did no better. Faced with Grant as the strong Republican nominee, they too nominated Horace Greeley with B. Gratz Brown as his running mate, hoping by this coalition to achieve victory. The Republicans, still unwilling to go the whole way for woman suffrage by giving it the recognition of a plank in their platform, did, however, offer women a splinter at which Susan grasped eagerly because it was the first time an important, powerful political party had ever mentioned women in their platform.
"The Republican party," read the splinter, "is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom; their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction; and the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration."[283]
Thankful to have escaped involvement with Victoria Woodhull and her Equal Rights party just at this time when the Republicans were ready to smile upon women, Susan basked in an aura of respectability thrown around her by her new political allies. She was even hopeful that the two woman-suffrage factions could now forget their differences and work together for "the living, vital issue of today—freedom to women."
She at once began speaking for the Republican party, looking forward to carrying the discussion of woman suffrage into every school district and every ward meeting. In the beginning the Republicans were generous with funds, giving her $1,000 for women's meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, and other large cities. For speakers she sought both Lucy Stone and Anna E. Dickinson, but Lucy made it plain in letters to Mrs. Stanton that she would take no part in Republican rallies conducted by Susan, and Anna responded with a torrent of false accusations.[284]Only Mary Livermore of the American Association consented to speak at Susan's Republican rallies; but with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, andOlympia Brown to call upon, Susan did not lack for effective orators.
In anAppeal to the Women of America, financed by the Republicans and widely circulated, she urged the election of Grant and Wilson and the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom she described as women's most bitter opponent. "Both by tongue and pen," she declared, "he has heaped abuse, ridicule, and misrepresentation upon our leading women, while the whole power of theTribunehad been used to crush our great reform...."[285]
Beyond this she was unwilling to go in criticizing her one-time friend. In fact her sense of fairness recoiled at the ridicule and defamation heaped upon Horace Greeley in the campaign. "I shall not join with the Republicans," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "in hounding Greeley and the Liberals with all the old war anathemas of the Democracy.... My sense of justice and truth is outraged by the Harper's cartoons of Greeley and the general falsifying tone of the Republican press. It is not fair for us to join in the cry that everybody who is opposed to the present administration is either a Democrat or an apostate."[286]
Susan sensed a change in the Republicans' attitude toward women, as they grew increasingly confident of victory. Not only did they refuse further financial aid, but criticized Susan roundly because in her speeches she emphasized woman suffrage rather than the virtues of the Republican party. She ignored their complaints, and wrote Mrs. Stanton, "If you are willing to go forth ... saying that you endorse the party on any other point ... than that of its recognition of woman's claim to vote,Iam not...."[287]
Susan preached militancy to women throughout the presidential campaign of 1872, urging them to claim their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by registering and voting in every state in the Union.
Even before Francis Minor had called her attention to the possibilities offered by these amendments, she had followed with great interest a similar effort by Englishwomen who, in 1867 and 1868, had attempted to prove that the "ancient legal rights of females" were still valid and entitled women property holders to vote for representatives in Parliament, and who claimed that the word "man" in Parliamentary statutes should be interpreted to include women. In the case of the 5,346 householders of Manchester, the court held that "every woman is personally incapable" in a legal sense.[288]This legal contest had been fully reported inThe Revolution, and disappointing as the verdict was, Susan looked upon this attempt to establish justice as an indication of a great awakening and uprising among women.
There had also been heartening signs in her own country, which she hoped were the preparation for more successful militancy to come. She had exulted inThe Revolutionin 1868 over the attempt of women to vote in Vineland, New Jersey. Encouraged by the enfranchisement of women in Wyoming in 1869, Mary Olney Brown and Charlotte Olney French had cast their votes in Washington Territory. A young widow, Marilla Ricker, had registered and voted in New Hampshire in 1870, claiming this right as a property holder, but her vote was refused. In 1871, Nannette B. Gardner and Catherine Stebbins in Detroit, Catherine V. White in Illinois, Ellen R. Van Valkenburg in Santa Cruz, California, and Carrie S. Burnham in Philadelphia registered and attempted to vote. Only Mrs. Gardner's vote was accepted. That same year, Sarah Andrews Spencer, Sarah E. Webster, and seventy other women marched to the polls to register and vote in the District of Columbia. Their ballots refused, they brought suit against the Board of ElectionInspectors, carrying the case unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court of the United States.[289]Another test case based on the Fourteenth Amendment had also been carried to the Supreme Court by Myra Bradwell, one of the first women lawyers, who had been denied admission to the Illinois bar because she was a woman.
With the spotlight turned on the Fourteenth Amendment by these women, lawyers here and there throughout the country were discussing the legal points involved, many admitting that women had a good case. Even the press was friendly.
Susan had looked forward to claiming her rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and was ready to act. She had spent the thirty days required of voters in Rochester with her family and as she glanced through the morning paper of November 1, 1872, she read these challenging words, "Now Register!... If you were not permitted to vote you would fight for the right, undergo all privations for it, face death for it...."[290]
This was all the reminder she needed. She would fight for this right. She put on her bonnet and coat, telling her three sisters what she intended to do, asked them to join her, and with them walked briskly to the barber shop where the voters of her ward were registering. Boldly entering this stronghold of men, she asked to be registered. The inspector in charge, Beverly W. Jones, tried to convince her that this was impossible under the laws of New York. She told him she claimed her right to vote not under the New York constitution but under the Fourteenth Amendment, and she read him its pertinent lines. Other election inspectors now joined in the argument, but she persisted until two of them, Beverly W. Jones and Edwin F. Marsh, both Republicans, finally consented to register the four women.
This mission accomplished, Susan rounded up twelve more women willing to register. The evening papers spread the sensational news, and by the end of the registration period, fifty Rochester women had joined the ranks of the militants.
On election day, November 5, 1872, Susan gleefully wrote Elizabeth Stanton, "Well, I have gone and done it!!—positively voted the Republican ticket—Strait—thisa.m.at 7 o'clock—& swore my vote in at that.... All my three sisters voted—Rhoda deGarmo too—Amy Post was rejected & she will immediatelybring action against the registrars.... Not a jeer not a word—not a look—disrespectful has met a single woman.... I hope the mornings telegrams will tell of many women all over the country trying to vote.... I hope you voted too."[291]
Election day did not bring the general uprising of women for which Susan had hoped. In Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Connecticut, as in Rochester, a few women tried to vote. In New York City, Lillie Devereux Blake and in Fayetteville, New York, Matilda Joslyn Gage had courageously gone to the polls only to be turned away. Elizabeth Stanton did not vote on November 5, 1872, and her lack of enthusiasm about a test case in the courts was very disappointing to Susan.
However, the fact that Susan B. Anthony had voted won immediate response from the press in all parts of the country. Newspapers in general were friendly, the New YorkTimesboldly declaring, "The act of Susan B. Anthony should have a place in history," and the ChicagoTribuneventuring to suggest that she ought to hold public office. The cartoonists, however, reveling in a new and tempting subject, caricatured her unmercifully, the New York Graphic setting the tone. Some Democratic papers condemned her, following the line of the RochesterUnion and Advertiserwhich flaunted the headline, "Female Lawlessness," and declared that Miss Anthony's lawlessness had proved women unfit for the ballot.
Before she voted, Susan had taken the precaution of consulting Judge Henry R. Selden, a former judge of the Court of Appeals. After listening with interest to her story and examining the arguments of Benjamin Butler, Francis Minor, and Albert G. Riddle in support of the claim that women had a right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, he was convinced that women had a good case and consented to advise her and defend her if necessary. Judge Selden, now retired from the bench because of ill health, was practicing law in Rochester where he was highly respected. A Republican, he had served as lieutenant governor, member of the Assembly, and state senator. Susan had known him as one of the city's active abolitionists, a friend of Frederick Douglass who had warned him to flee the country after the raid onHarper's Ferry and the capture of John Brown. Such a man she felt she could trust.
All was quiet for about two weeks after the election and it looked as if the episode might be forgotten in the jubilation over Grant's election. Then, on November 18, the United States deputy marshal rang the doorbell at 7 Madison Street and asked for Miss Susan B. Anthony. When she greeted him, he announced with embarrassment that he had come to arrest her.
"Is this your usual manner of serving a warrant?" she asked in surprise.[292]
He then handed her papers, charging that she had voted in violation of Section 19 of an Act of Congress, which stipulated that anyone voting knowingly without having the lawful right to vote was guilty of a crime, and on conviction would be punished by a fine not exceeding $500, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years.
This was a serious development. It had never occurred to Susan that this law, passed in 1870 to halt the voting of southern rebels, could actually be applicable to her. In fact, she had expected to bring suit against election inspectors for refusing to accept the ballots of women. Now charged with crime and arrested, she suddenly began to sense the import of what was happening to her.
When the marshal suggested that she report alone to the United States Commissioner, she emphatically refused to go of her own free will and they left the house together, she extending her wrists for the handcuffs and he ignoring her gesture. As they got on the streetcar and the conductor asked for her fare, she further embarrassed the marshal by loudly announcing, "I'm traveling at the expense of the government. This gentleman is escorting me to jail. Ask him for my fare." When they arrived at the commissioner's office, he was not there, but a hearing was set for November 29.
On that day, in the office where a few years before fugitive slaves had been returned to their masters, Susan was questioned and cross-examined, and she felt akin to those slaves. Proudly she admitted that she had voted, that she had conferred with Judge Selden, that with or without his advice she would have attempted to vote to test women's right to the franchise.[293]
"Did you have any doubt yourself of your right to vote?" asked the commissioner.
"Not a particle," she replied.
On December 23, 1872, in Rochester's common council chamber, before a large curious audience, Susan, the other women voters, and the election inspectors were arraigned. People expecting to see bold notoriety-seeking women were surprised by their seriousness and dignity. "The majority of these law-breakers," reported the press, "were elderly, matronly-looking women with thoughtful faces, just the sort one would like to see in charge of one's sick-room, considerate, patient, kindly."[294]
The United States Commissioner fixed their bail at $500 each. All furnished bail but Susan, who through her counsel, Henry R. Selden, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, demanding immediate release and challenging the lawfulness of her arrest. When a writ of habeas corpus was denied and her bail increased to $1,000 by United States District Judge Nathan K. Hall, sitting in Albany, Susan was more than ever determined to resist the interference of the courts in her constitutional right as a citizen to vote. She refused to give bail, emphatically stating that she preferred prison.
Seeing no heroism but only disgrace in a jail term for his client and unwilling to let her bring this ignominy upon herself. Henry Selden chivalrously assured her that this was a time when she must be guided by her lawyer's advice, and he paid her bail. Ignorant of the technicalities of the law, she did not realize the far-reaching implications of this well-intentioned act until they left the courtroom and in the hallway met tall vigorous John Van Voorhis of Rochester who was working on the case with Judge Selden. With the impatience of a younger man, eager to fight to the finish, he exclaimed, "You have lost your chance to get your case before the Supreme Court by writ of habeas corpus!"[295]
Aghast, Susan rushed back to the courtroom, hoping to cancel the bond, but it was too late. Bitterly disappointed, she remonstrated with Henry Selden, but he quietly replied, "I could not see a lady I respected in jail." She never forgave him for this, in spite of her continued appreciation of his keen legal mind, his unfailing kindness, and his willingness to battle for women.
Within a few days she appeared before the Federal Grand Juryin 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.
Judge Henry R. SeldenJudge 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 constitution 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 Washington, 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 mindof the Nation. It is no longer whether women wish to vote, or men are willing, but it is woman's Constitutional 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 Washington 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 passages from the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, 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 analyzed 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 constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human rights 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."
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 assured of a friendly welcome and a good audience.[300]