This month is the 152nd anniversary of the trial of Susan B. Anthony for voting in the Presidential Election of 1872. Several women suffragists showed up at various polls around the U.S. to vote on Election Day, November 5, 1872. One of them was Abigail Scott Duniway in Oregon. A more famous suffragist who voted that day was Susan B. Anthony.
My work-in-progress recounts Abigail Scott Duniway’s attempt to vote. Mrs. Duniway, a newspaper editor and vocal suffragist, went to the polls in Portland, Oregon, to vote along with three other women. A few days after the election, The Oregonian newspaper reported that the election judge at the polling station received the four women’s ballots but refused to place them in the ballot box. Instead, he tucked them beneath it so they would not be counted. Thus, Mrs. Duniway and her companions were not allowed to vote, and they suffered no legal penalties for their attempt.
By contrast, in Rochester, New York, Susan B. Anthony argued her way into being permitted to register to vote before election day. On election day, she and fourteen other women did cast ballots in Rochester, and their ballots were counted.
However, two weeks after the election, Mrs. Anthony was arrested for voting illegally. Not only was Mrs. Anthony arrested, but so were the other women who accompanied her, along with the three men who had permitted them to register to vote before the election. The other women all posted bail, but Mrs. Anthony refused to do so. Her lawyer posted bail for her, which upset her greatly, and she was released, pending trial.
Legal hearings and a grand jury indictment in Mrs. Anthony’s case occurred over the next several months, and in June 1873, she went on trial in Rochester for voting illegally.
Between her arrest and the trial, Mrs. Anthony went on a lecture tour in which she vigorously defended her right to vote. Quoting the Declaration of Independence, the U. S. Constitution, the New York Constitution, James Madison, Thomas Paine, the Supreme Court, and several Republican senators of the day, she argued women had the right to vote as citizens of the United States.
Her lawyers made similar arguments during the two-day trial in June 1873. They also argued that Mrs. Anthony reasonably believed that she was entitled to vote and acted in good faith in casting her vote. Therefore, they said, she could not be guilty because she was being prosecuted under a statute that required intent to vote illegally.
Despite her lawyers’ efforts, the judge took the case away from the jury and ordered the jurors to deliver a guilty verdict. After the directed verdict, Mrs. Anthony was permitted an opportunity to speak, and she told the judge in part:
“. . . in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.”
The judge was not persuaded by her words, and he fined Mrs. Anthony $100—a fine she refused to pay. The government put little effort into collecting from her, and in the years after her trial, Mrs. Anthony used her conviction—which she argued was wrongful throughout the remainder of her life—to advance the women’s suffrage movement.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Anthony died in 1906, and the 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote was not ratified until 1920. Thus, the only presidential vote this ardent suffragist ever cast was in 1872.
What do you know about the women’s suffrage movement in the United States?
