can invoke the Constitution to prevent his being tried, in a proper case, by any other tribunal than a jury; but if there is no legislation, congressional or other, to give him a trial by jury, I think, under the decisions, it would be very difficult to see how it might be done. Therefore, the point is for the friends of woman suffrage to get congressional legislation.
The results of the trial showed that General Butler was right in thinking that further legislation would be required to enable women to vote under the Constitution of the United States. It proved also that a judge could set aside the right of a citizen to a trial by jury, supposed to be guaranteed by every safeguard which could be thrown around it by this same Constitution.
1. Present, Lyman Trumbull, Illinois, chairman; Roscoe Conkling, New York; F.F. Frelinghuysen, New Jersey; Matthew H. Carpenter, Wisconsin.
2. See History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. II.
3. Susan B. Anthony, Mary S. Anthony, Guelma Anthony McLean, Hannah Anthony Mosher, Rhoda De Garmo, Sarah Truesdale, Mary Pulver, Lottie B. Anthony, Nancy M. Chapman, Susan M. Hough, Hannah Chatfield, Margaret Leyden, Mary Culver, Ellen S. Baker, Mary L. Hebard (wife of the editor of the Express).
4. When a jurist as eminent as Judge Henry R. Selden testifies that he told Miss Anthony before election that she had a right to vote, and this after a careful examination of the question, the whole subject assumes new importance.... How grateful to Judge Selden must all the suffragists be! He has struck the strongest and most promising blow in their behalf that has yet been given. Dred Scott was the pivot on which the Constitution turned before the war. Miss Anthony seems likely to occupy a similar position now.—New York Commercial Advertiser. The arrest of the fifteen women of Rochester, and the imprisonment of the renowned Miss Susan B. Anthony, for voting at the November election, afford a curious illustration of the extent to which the United States government is stretching its hand in these matters. If these women violated any law at all by voting, it was clearly a statute of the State of New York, and that State might safely be left to vindicate the majesty of its own laws. It is only by an over-strained stretch of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments that the national government can force its long finger into the Rochester case at all.—New York Sun. Whatever may be said of Susan B. Anthony, there is no doubt but she has kept the public mind of the country agitated upon the woman's rights question as few others, male or female, could have done. She has displayed very superior judgment and has seldom been led into acts of even seeming impropriety. She has won the respect of all classes by her ability, her consistency and her spotless character, and she today stands far in advance of all her co-workers in the estimation of the people. The fact that she voted at Rochester at the presidential election has created no little commotion on the part of the press, but if women are to become voters, who but the one who has taken the lead in the advocacy of that right should be among the first to cast the vote?—Toledo Blade. We pause in the midst of our pressing duties to admire the zeal and courage which find in the course of these ladies a challenge to battle, while evils a thousandfold worse, such as bribery, etc., are permitted to pass unnoticed.... The ladies who voted in this city on the 5th of this month did so from the conviction that they had a constitutional right to the ballot. In that they may or may not have been mistaken, but they certainly can not be justly classed with the ordinary illegal voter and repeater. The latter always vote for a pecuniary consideration, knowingly and intentionally violating our laws to get gain. The former voted for a principle and to assert what, they esteem a right. The attempt by insinuation to class them among the ordinary illegal voters will react upon its movers.—Rochester Evening Express.
5. Complaint has this day been made by —— on oath before me, William C. Storrs, commissioner, charging that Susan B. Anthony, on or about the fifth day of November, 1872, at the city of Rochester, N. Y., at an election held in the Eighth ward of the city of Rochester aforesaid, for a representative in the Congress of the United States, did then and there vote for a representative in the Congress of the United States, without having a lawful right to vote and in violation of Section 19 of an act of Congress approved May 31, 1870, entitled "An act, to enforce the right of citizens of the United States to vote in the several States of this Union and for other purposes."
Chapter XXV:
Trial for Voting Under Fourteenth Amendment
(1873)
Miss Anthony's speech at Washington Convention; she appears before U.S. District-Judge at Albany and bail is increased to $1,000; addresses State Constitutional Commission; indicted by grand jury; becomes unconscious on lecture platform at Ft. Wayne; votes again; call for Twenty-fifth Suffrage Anniversary; Miss Anthony delivers her great Constitutional Argument in twenty-nine post office districts in Monroe Co.; District-Attorney moves her trial to another county; she speaks at twenty-one places and Mrs. Gage at sixteen in that county; Rochester Union and Advertiser condemns her; trial opens at Canandaigua; masterly argument of Judge Selden; Justice Ward Hunt delivers Written Opinion without leaving bench; declines to submit case to Jury or to allow it to be polled; refuses new trial; spirited encounter between Miss Anthony and Judge; newspaper comment; trial of Inspectors; Judge refuses to allow Counsel to address Jury; opinion of Mr. Van Voorhis; contributions sent to Miss Anthony by friends; death of sister Guelma McLean; Miss Anthony's letter of grief to mother; generous gift of Anson Lapham.
In the midst of these harassing circumstances Miss Anthony made the usual preparations for holding the annual woman suffrage convention in Washington, January 16 and 17, 1873, and presided over its deliberations. In her opening speech she said:
There are three methods of extending suffrage to new classes. The first is for the legislatures of the several States to submit the question to those already voters. Before the war this was the only way thought of, and during all those years we petitioned the legislatures to submit an amendment striking the word "male" from the suffrage clause of the State constitutions. The second method is for Congress to submit to the several legislatures a proposition for a Sixteenth Amendment which shall prohibit the States from depriving women citizens of their right to vote. The third plan is for women to take their right under the Fourteenth Amendment of the National Constitution, which declares that all persons are citizens, and no State shall deny or abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens.
Again, there are two ways of securing the right of suffrage under the Constitution as it is, one by a declaratory act of Congress instructing the officers of election to receive the votes of women; the other by bringing suits before the courts, as women already have done, in order to secure a judicial decision on the broad interpretation of the Constitution that all persons are citizens, and all citizens voters. The vaults in yonder Capitol hold the petitions of 100,000 women for a declaratory act, and the calendars of our courts show that many are already testing their right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. I stand here under indictment for having exercised my right as a citizen to vote at the last election; and by a fiction of the law, I am now in custody and not a free person on this platform.
Among the forcible resolutions adopted were one asserting "that States may regulate all local questions of property, taxation, etc., but the inalienable personal rights of citizenship must be declared by the Constitution, interpreted by the Supreme Court, protected by Congress, and enforced by the arm of the Executive;" and another declaring "that the criminal prosecution of Susan B. Anthony by the United States, for the alleged crime of exercising the citizen's right of suffrage, is an act of arbitrary and unconstitutional authority and a blow at the liberties of every
