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United States v. Susan B. Anthony

The NWSA convention of 1871 adopted a strategy of urging women to attempt to vote, and then, after being turned away, to file suits in federal courts to challenge laws that prevented women from voting. The legal basis for the challenge would be the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment, part of which reads: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States".

Following the example set by Anthony and her sisters shortly before election day, a total of nearly fifty women in Rochester registered to vote in the presidential election of 1872. On election day, Anthony and fourteen other women from her ward convinced the election inspectors to allow them to cast ballots, but women in other wards were turned back. Anthony was arrested on November 18, 1872, by a U.S. Deputy Marshal and charged with illegally voting. The other women who had voted were also arrested but released pending the outcome of Anthony's trial. Anthony's trial generated a national controversy and became a major step in the transition of the broader women's rights movement into the women's suffrage movement.

Anthony spoke throughout Monroe County, New York, where her trial was to be held and from where the jurors for her trial would be chosen. Her speech was entitled "Is it a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?" She said, "We no longer petition Legislature or Congress to give us the right to vote. We appeal to women everywhere to exercise their too long neglected 'citizen's right to vote. ' " The U.S. Attorney arranged for the trial to be moved to the federal circuit court, which would soon sit in neighboring Ontario County with a jury drawn from that county's inhabitants. Anthony responded by speaking throughout that county also before the trial began.

Responsibility for that federal circuit was in the hands of Justice Ward Hunt, who had recently been appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunt had never served as a trial judge; originally a politician, he had begun his judicial career by being elected to the New York Court of Appeals.

The trial, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, began on June 17, 1873, and was closely followed by the national press. Following a rule of common law at that time which prevented criminal defendants in federal courts from testifying, Hunt refused to allow Anthony to speak until the verdict had been delivered. On the second day of the trial, after both sides had presented their cases, Justice Hunt delivered his lengthy opinion, which he had put in writing. In the most controversial aspect of the trial, Hunt directed the jury to deliver a guilty verdict.

On the second day of the trial, Hunt asked Anthony if she had anything to say. She responded with "the most famous speech in the history of the agitation for woman suffrage", according to Ann D. Gordon, a historian of the women's movement. Repeatedly ignoring the judge's order to stop talking and sit down, she protested what she called "this high-handed outrage upon my citizen's rights", saying, "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." She castigated Justice Hunt for denying her a trial by jury, but said that even if he had allowed the jury to discuss the case, she still would have been denied a trial by a jury of her peers because women were not allowed to be jurors.

I stand before you tonight a convicted criminal... convicted by a Supreme Court Judge... and sentenced to pay $100 fine and costs. For what? For asserting my right to representation in a government, based upon the one idea of the right of every person governed to participate in that government. This is the result at the close of 100 years of this government, that I, a native born American citizen, am found guilty of neither lunacy nor idiocy, but of a crime—simply because I exercised our right to vote.

Speech to the Union League Club, N.Y. December 16, 1873

When Justice Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a fine of $100 (equivalent to $2,500 in 2023), she responded, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty", and she never did.If Hunt had ordered her to be jailed until she paid the fine, Anthony could have taken her case to the Supreme Court. Hunt instead announced he would not order her taken into custody, closing off that legal avenue.

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1875 put an end to the strategy of trying to achieve women's suffrage through the court system when it ruled in Minor v. Happersett that "the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone". The NWSA decided to pursue the far more difficult strategy of campaigning for a constitutional amendment to achieve voting rights for women.

On August 18, 2020—the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment—President Donald Trump announced that he would pardon Anthony, 148 years after her conviction. The president of the National Susan B. Anthony Museum and House wrote to "decline" the offer of a pardon on the principle that, to accept a pardon would wrongly "validate" the trial proceedings in the same manner that paying the $100 fine would have.