The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — Susan B. Anthony Casts a Vote That Challenges the Nation

On this day in 1872

On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted for Grant in Rochester, was arrested within two weeks, and refused to the end of her life to pay her $100 fine.

The Off-Key Bard enters a polling place in Rochester, New York, on Election Day, 1872. Men are arriving to cast their ballots in the presidential race between incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and the newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Among the voters is a 52-year-old woman who has spent decades pressing against the limits placed on women in American life. Her name is Susan B. Anthony. She and fourteen other women from her ward have come to claim a right she believes the Constitution already guarantees.

"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."

On November 5, 1872, Anthony voted in a presidential election, in defiance of laws that restricted the ballot to men. She voted the Republican ticket. Thirteen days later a deputy U.S. marshal arrested her. She was tried, convicted by a jury that was told to convict, and fined $100, which she never paid. Her argument lost in court. But the case put a plain question in front of the public: if women are citizens, why can they not vote?

The Road to Rochester

In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention issued a Declaration of Sentiments modeled on the Declaration of Independence. Elizabeth Cady Stanton added a resolution on women's right to vote. Her own husband warned it would turn the meeting into a farce, and Lucretia Mott opposed it, but it passed by a large majority on the second day. Frederick Douglass, the only African American attendee, spoke for it. Anthony took no part in the meeting.

Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker family, and she worked as a teacher before turning to reform. In 1851 she met Stanton, and the two began a partnership that lasted decades.

Voting was mostly a matter for the states, and women had once voted in places. In New Jersey, unmarried women who owned property could vote from 1776 until 1807, when the state restricted the vote to "free, white, male citizens."

The Amendments and the Split

After the Civil War, many suffragists expected their cause to advance. It did not. The Fourteenth Amendment's second section put the word "male" into the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified February 3, 1870, barred discrimination in voting on account of race, but not sex.

That divided the movement. Stone and Douglass, among others, backed Black male suffrage first. Anthony and Stanton opposed any amendment that left women out. In 1869 Anthony and Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, which sought a federal amendment, and Lucy Stone and Julia Ward Howe founded the American Woman Suffrage Association, which pursued state campaigns. The National Park Service notes that in these fights Anthony and Stanton argued that "educated" white women deserved the vote first. Stanton used a racial slur, and Douglass publicly criticized her language. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Sojourner Truth criticized both sides for ignoring Black women. That is a painful part of the movement's history, and it belongs with the heroic part.

The New Departure

By the early 1870s some activists had a different plan. Instead of waiting for a new amendment, they argued that the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause already protected women's right to vote. Women were citizens, they said, and voting was a privilege of citizenship. The strategy was called the New Departure. Virginia Minor of Missouri was one of its leading figures. The courts had not accepted the theory, so the plan was to test it by registering and voting.

Registering and Voting

On November 1, 1872, Anthony and her sisters Guelma, Hannah and Mary demanded to be registered in Rochester. The election inspectors eventually agreed. Nearly fifty Rochester women registered over the following days. On November 5, Anthony and fourteen other women from her ward voted, while women in other wards were turned away. Accounts differ on how many women registered on that first day, so the exact number is best left open.

Her vote was accepted, and her ballot went into the box. In her letter to Stanton she wrote that she had "positively voted the Republican ticket—strait," and "Well, I have been & gone & done it!" The ABA Journal notes that this was apparently the only time she voted in a state or federal election.

The election itself went to Grant. Greeley, who had been nominated by the Liberal Republicans and endorsed by the Democrats, died on November 29, 1872, after the popular vote but before the Electoral College met.

Arrest

Nine days after the election, U.S. Commissioner William Storrs issued warrants for Anthony and the other fourteen women, on the complaint of a poll watcher. They were charged under section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870 with voting for members of the U.S. House "without having a lawful right to vote." The act was passed during Reconstruction to protect elections, and here it was being used against a woman who claimed the Constitution protected her vote.

On November 18, a deputy U.S. marshal arrested Anthony at her home. The other fourteen women who had voted were also subjected to federal proceedings, but Anthony became the central defendant and the only one brought to trial. She initially refused bail, hoping to challenge her detention through a writ of habeas corpus and bring the constitutional question before a higher court. Although an order was issued in December directing that she be taken to jail, her attorneys ultimately secured her release while the case proceeded. The government's prosecution turned her act of voting into a national debate over whether citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment included the right to vote.

She turned the case into a campaign. Before the trial she spoke in 29 towns and villages in Monroe County, in a speech titled "Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" She argued that governments exist to secure rights, not to grant them, and that "being persons, then, women are citizens."

The Trial

The trial began on June 17, 1873, in Canandaigua, New York, before a jury of twelve men. Ward Hunt, an associate justice of the Supreme Court sitting as a circuit judge, presided alone, contrary to normal practice. Her attorney, Henry R. Selden, argued that the Fourteenth Amendment protected her.

Hunt would not let her testify until after the verdict. He declared: "The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting by Miss Anthony was in violation of the law." He then directed the jury to return a guilty verdict and refused to poll them, reasoning that the right to a jury applies only when the facts are disputed. Lawyers, politicians and the press criticized the directed verdict as a violation of the right to a jury trial.

Asked whether she had anything to say, Anthony protested "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights." The sentence was a $100 fine plus the costs of prosecution. "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty," she answered. The National Archives holds the record of her conviction, dated June 28, 1873.

Hunt did not order her jailed until she paid. That closed the path she wanted, because an imprisoned defendant could have sought a writ of habeas corpus and carried the question to the Supreme Court. She never paid, and the government made no serious effort to collect. In January 1874 she petitioned Congress to remit the fine, and a House bill to do so did not pass.

The three election inspectors who had registered her fared worse. They were tried after her, found guilty, and fined $25 each. They refused to pay and were jailed until President Grant pardoned them on March 3, 1874.

The Court Closes the Door

The Supreme Court settled the legal question in Minor v. Happersett on March 29, 1875. Virginia Minor had been refused registration in St. Louis County on October 15, 1872. The Court, in a unanimous opinion by Chief Justice Morrison Waite, agreed that women were citizens, but held that citizenship did not carry a right to vote and that the Constitution did not confer suffrage on anyone. That ended the New Departure in the courts.

The Long Campaign

Progress came by other routes. Wyoming Territory gave women the vote on December 10, 1869, and kept it when it became a state in 1890. In 1890 Anthony's association and Stone's merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and Anthony became its president in 1892. She died on March 13, 1906, at the age of 86, fourteen years before the national victory. The amendment was first introduced in 1878 by Senator Aaron A. Sargent, and became known as the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment."

Congress passed what became the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. The House voted May 21 and the Senate on June 4. On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify it, and Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified it on August 26. It had been nearly forty-eight years since the ballot in Rochester.

The Nineteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on account of sex, but it did not eliminate other voting barriers. Many Black women, particularly in the South, continued to face discriminatory registration requirements, poll taxes, intimidation and violence. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 challenged many of those practices, though it did not immediately eliminate every obstacle. Native American women faced additional barriers. While some Native Americans already held U.S. citizenship, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 extended citizenship to those born within the United States who had not previously received it. Even afterward, some states continued restricting Native American voting rights, with legal exclusions and discriminatory practices persisting well into the twentieth century.

Remembering the Case

The surviving records let readers see the arguments for themselves. In August 2020, President Donald Trump announced a pardon of Anthony. The National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House rejected it, and its president said: "To pay would have been to validate the proceedings."

A ballot cast, a right denied,
Yet still her voice would not subside.
A hundred dollars, left unpaid—
A challenge history could not fade.

The story of November 5, 1872, is not simply about someone breaking an election law. It is about a citizen testing whether the law was consistent with the principles of her country. The courts rejected her reading of the Fourteenth Amendment, and she lost. Yet the trial, the directed verdict and the unpaid fine kept the question before the public until the Constitution was changed.

She did not live to see it. The movement she helped lead was never one thing, and its leaders disagreed about strategy and about race. What the case shows is how much patience and persistence constitutional change can take, and that a citizen who refused to accept the answer she was given helped open the door for those who followed.

Sources

← Back to the Desk — History