Susan B. Anthony, The Vote, the Arrest, the Fine She Never Paid

On November fifth, eighteen seventy-two, Susan B. Anthony walked into a barbershop in Rochester, New York, that was serving as a polling station and cast a ballot in the federal election. She had argued to the election officials that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified four years earlier to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people, applied equally to women. She was one of fifteen women in Rochester who voted that day.

Thirteen days later, a federal deputy marshal knocked on her door and placed her under arrest.

She was tried in June of eighteen seventy-three before a judge named Ward Hunt, who had made up his mind before the trial began. He directed the jury to return a verdict of guilty. He fined her one hundred dollars. She told him she would never pay a cent of it.

The judge had a problem. If he imprisoned her, she could file a writ of habeas corpus and take the case to a higher court. He declined to imprison her. By doing so, he eliminated her only legal avenue to appeal. She was convicted of a crime, fined, and released with no way to challenge either. The conviction stood.

She spent the next thirty-three years organizing. She traveled the country, testified before Congress, and helped draft what would become the Nineteenth Amendment. She died in Rochester in nineteen oh six, at the age of eighty-six, fourteen years before the amendment she had championed was ratified. One of her last public statements was simple: "Failure is impossible."

The house in Rochester where she lived from eighteen sixty-six until her death is now a National Historic Site. The one hundred dollars was never paid.