The Illegal Vote, Susan B. Anthony's 1872 Arrest

On a November morning in eighteen seventy-two, Susan B. Anthony walked into a barbershop voter registration office in Rochester and registered to vote in the upcoming presidential election. She cited the Fourteenth Amendment, which she argued made her a citizen entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizenship, including the ballot. The registrars, after some deliberation, accepted her application. On election day, she voted the Republican ticket.

Two weeks later, a federal marshal knocked on the door of her house on Madison Street and placed her under arrest.

The trial was held the following June in the federal court at Canandaigua, about thirty miles away. The judge was Ward Hunt, recently elevated to the United States Supreme Court. He did not permit the jury to deliberate. He directed them to return a verdict of guilty, which under law at the time he was permitted to do in a federal criminal case, a procedure the Supreme Court would not overturn until eighteen ninety-five.

When he asked Anthony if she had anything to say before sentencing, she had quite a lot. Told repeatedly to sit down, she kept talking. She called what had happened a high-handed outrage upon her citizen's rights. She protested the injustice of a system that taxed women without representing them. When Hunt fined her one hundred dollars, she said flatly that she would never pay it. He then announced that she would not be imprisoned for refusing, a calculated move that prevented her from appealing to a higher court.

She never paid the fine. She never stopped speaking. The amendment she had spent thirty years advocating for passed fourteen years after her death, in nineteen twenty, and carries her name to this day. Her home on Madison Street is a National Historic Landmark and a working museum, the place where a woman who was not supposed to vote decided that the law was wrong.