Martin Naparsteck - The Trial of Susan B. Anthony: An Illegal Vote, a Courtroom Conviction and a Step Toward Womens Suffrage

Also by Martin Naparsteck and from McFarland

Mrs. Mark Twain: The Life of Olivia Langdon Clemens, 18451904 (with Michelle Cardulla, 2014)

Sex and Manifest Destiny: The Urge That Drove Americans Westward (2012)

Richard Yates Up Close: The Writer and His Works (2012)

Martin Naparsteck

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-1757-2

2014 Martin Naparsteck. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: Susan B. Anthony photograph (by Mathew B. Brady, ca. 1870 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS); Ontario County Courthouse in Canandaigua, New York (Martin Naparsteck)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

Again for
Taft, America, Molly
and for
the millions of women and men who fought for the right of women
to vote.

Thank you to Marcilyn Morrisey, Commissioner of Jurors in Ontario County, New York, for an enlightening tour of the Ontario County Courthouse, where Susan B. Anthony was tried.

To Ruth Rosenberg-Naparsteck, former historian for the city of Rochester, for useful information and leads, and for use of photographs from her private collection.

To Sara Kersting and Michelle Cardulla for encouragement and useful comments.

To the helpful staff in the Local History Division of the Rochester Public Library, and librarians in the New York towns of Greece, Irondequoit, Webster, and Canandaigua.

To Steve Petteway of the Office of the Curator of the Supreme Court of the United States, for providing the photograph of Associate Justice Ward Hunt.

And for many others too numerous to enumerate.

Susan B. Anthony had much in common with George Washington. Both were more admirable than amiable. Much of what has been written about each has been hagiographic. They are often seen as humorless and harsh, and the available historical evidence suggests that is pretty much accurate. These two leaders were skilled at keeping a following alive but possessed little talent for strategy or tactics. Both had high opinions of themselves and often low opinions of others.

Yet, just as it is difficult to see how the Americans could have defeated the British in the Revolution if someone other than Washington had led their army, even a more talented general, and how the new republic could have survived its earliest years if someone else had been its first president, its just as difficult to imagine that the womens suffragist movement would have been successful if any other woman had assumed the figurehead position accorded to Anthony. She was, while alive and still today, the towering figure of the long, often bitter fight to win American women the right to vote.

And she had one more attribute she shared with Washington. She triumphed in defeat. Just as Washington lost most of the major battles he fought against the British, so too did Anthony lose in her major efforts. Her genius was visible only in the light of the final victory. She kept the army of suffragists together, marching forward, through defeat after defeat, untilafter she died and could not benefit from itvictory finally arrived in the form of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, often called, appropriately, the Susan B. Anthony amendment.

Washington, from the British point of view, committed the crime of treason. Anthony, from the point of view of a federal district attorney, committed the crime of voting. That is the subject of this book. That crime.

She did not set out to commit a crime, but as circumstances unfolded, a crime of opportunity presented itself and she did not let it pass.

Her plan was simple. She would go the polling place, say she wanted to register to vote, and would be told she could not because New York state law allowed only men to vote. At the time no state permitted women to vote. And then she would sue. She would claim that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution gave all citizens, including women, the right to vote. It was an idea given to her by a lawyer in St. Louis, Francis Minor. Francis Minors wife, Virginia, would do the same thing. Try to register, be refused, sue. For Virginia Minor, thats how it worked out, so she did not commit a crime.

Anthony, however, played her role too well, and the three male inspectors of election in the First District of the Eighth Ward in Rochester, New Yorkconfused, given contradictory advice, young, inexperienced in their roles, and probably overwhelmed by the surprise presence of the most famous woman in the city, indeed, one of the most famous women in the countrysaid, well, maybe, all right, we think perhaps you can register.

That was on a Friday. The next Tuesday, which was the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November 1872, she showed up at the same place, and having been duly registered, cast a ballot. She voted a straight Republican ticket, including voting for the re-election of Ulysses S. Grant for president. She voted for Republicans because at their national convention they adopted a platform plank that said careful consideration should be given to things women want. Presumably that included the vote, but the plank didnt say that. That was all, careful consideration, nothing more. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthonys closest friend, called it more a splinter than a plank. But Anthony was far less concerned about whom she voted for than the act of voting.

That was a violation of New York state law, but the state did not charge her with a crime. The local federal district attorney, Richard Crowley, charged her under a federal law with violating the state law. That is, according to the federal law, anyone who was not allowed under a state law to vote but who did vote in a federal election had committed a federal crime.

Anthony was not charged with voting for anyone for state office, although she did, because that was not a federal crime. And, oddly, she was not charged with voting for the president. She was charged with voting for two candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives, one running for the seat from Rochester, one for a statewide seat (because the state legislature had not yet redistricted the state after the 1870 census gave New York an additional seat in Congress).

She was arrested, she was tried, she was found guilty. Her trial attracted a great deal of attention. Newspapers around the world reported on it. Even today it is the one detail of Susan B. Anthonys life that is best known about her. Probably the trial would have been covered extensively regardless of who the judge was. But the judge did something that made Anthony a martyr, something no other judge is known to have done before or since in an American courtroom.

The judge was Ward Hunt, who had just been appointed by Grant to be an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. And the Senate had already confirmed his appointment. At the time, Supreme Court justices rode circuits and sat as judges in trials. Hunts first act as a Supreme Court justice was to sit as judge in the Anthony trial. And when all the testimony was in, Hunt told the jury12 men, true and goodto find her guilty. A directed verdict. A clear violation of the 6th Amendments guarantee of a trial by jury. Never before, never since has that happened in a U.S. criminal court. Its permitted in civil cases, in very limited circumstances, but never in criminal cases.