 CHAPTER XV A NEW SLANT ON THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT While Susan was lecturing in the West, hoping to earn enough to pay off the revolution's debt, she was pondering a new approach to the enfranchisement of women which had been proposed by Francis Minor, a St. Louis attorney, and the husband of her friend, Virginia Minor. Francis Minor contended that while the Constitution gave the states the right to regulate suffrage, it nowhere gave them the power to prohibit it, and he believed that this conclusion was strengthened by the Fourteenth Amendment which provided that no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. To claim the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment made a great appeal to both Susan and Elizabeth Stanton. Susan published Francis Minor's arguments in the Revolution and also his suggestion that some woman test this interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by attempting to vote at the next election, while Mrs. Stanton used this new approach as the basis of her speech before a congressional committee in 1870. With such a fresh and thrilling project to develop, Susan looked forward to the annual Women's Suffrage Convention to be held in Washington in January 1871. So heavy was her lecture schedule that she reluctantly left preparations for the convention in the willing hands of Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was confident she could improve on Susan's meetings and guide the women's rights movement into more ladylike and aristocratic channels, winning over scores of men and women who hitherto had remained aloof. At the last moment, however, she appealed in desperation to Susan for help, and Susan, canceling important lecture engagements, hurried to Washington. Here she found the newspapers full of Victoria C. Woodhull and her memorial to Congress on Women's Suffrage, which had been presented by Senator Harris of Louisiana and Congressman Julian of Indiana. Using on the new approach to Women's Suffrage, Mrs. Woodhull based her arguments on the 14th and 15th Amendments, praying Congress to enact legislation to enable women to exercise the right to vote vested in them by these amendments. A hearing was scheduled before the House Judiciary Committee the very morning the convention opened. Susan consulted with her friends in Congress and overrode Mrs. Hooker's hesitancy about associating their organization with so questionable a woman as Victoria Woodhull. She engaged a constitutional lawyer, Albert G. Riddle, to represent the thirty thousand women who had petitioned Congress for the franchise. Susan, she and Mrs. Hooker attended the hearing and asked for prompt action on Women's Suffrage. This was the first congressional hearing on federal and franchisement. Previous hearings had considered trying the experiment only in the District of Columbia. Susan had never before seen Victoria Woodhull. Only in 1870 however, she had called at the brokerage office which Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, had opened in New York on Broad Street. The press had been full of amused comments regarding the Lady Bankers, and Susan had wanted to see for herself what kind of women they were. Here she met and talked with Tennessee Claflin, publishing their interview in the Revolution, and also an advertisement of Woodhull, Claflin and Company, Bankers and Brokers. About six weeks later, these prosperous Lady Brokers had established their own paper, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, and Oregon of Social Regeneration and Constructive Reform. But Susan had barely noticed its existence, so burdened had she been by the impending loss of her own paper, and by pressing lecture engagements. She was therefore unaware that this new weekly explored a field wider than finance, advocating as well women's suffrage and women's advancement, spiritualism, radical views on marriage, love and sex, and the nomination of Victoria C. Woodhull for President of the United States. Now in a committee room of the House of Representatives, Susan listened carefully as the dynamic, beautiful Victoria Woodhull read her memorial and her arguments to support it in a clear, well-modulated voice. Simply dressed in a dark blue gown, with a jaunty alpine hat perched on her curls, she gave the impression of innocent earnest youth, and she captivated not only the members of the Judiciary Committee, but the more critical suffragists as well. For the moment at least, she seemed an appropriate colleague of the forthright crusader Susan B. Anthony, and her fashionable friends Isabella Beecher Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. They invited Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, to their convention, and asked her to repeat her speech for them. At this convention Susan, encouraged by the favorable reception among politicians of the Woodhull Memorial, mapped out a new and militant campaign, based on her growing conviction that under the 14th Amendment women's rights as citizens were guaranteed. She urged women to claim their rights as citizens and persons under the 14th Amendment, to register and prepare to vote at the next election, and to bring suit in the courts if they were refused. No enthusiastic had been the reception of this new approach to women's suffrage, so favorable had been the news from those close to leading Republicans that Susan was unprepared for the adverse report of the Judiciary Committee on the Woodhull Memorial. She now studied the favorable minority report issued by Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts and William Lauffridge of Iowa. Their arguments seemed to her unanswerable, and hurriedly and impulsively, in the midst of her Western lecture tour, she dashed off a few lines to Victoria Woodhull, to whom she willingly gave credit for bringing out this report. Glorious old Ben, she wrote, he surely is going to pronounce the word that will settle the women question, just as he did the word contraband, that so summarily settled the Negro question. Everybody here chimes in with the new conclusion that we are already free. Far from New York, where Victoria's activities were being aired by the press, Susan thought of her at this time only in connection with the memorial, and its impact on the Judiciary Committee. To be sure, she heard stories crediting Benjamin Butler with the authorship of the Woodhull Memorial, and rumors reached her of Victoria's unorthodox views on love and marriage, and of her girlhood as a fortune teller, travelling about like a gypsy and living by her wits. Even so, Susan was ready to give Victoria the benefit of the doubt, until she herself found her harmful to the cause. For long ago she had learned to discount attacks on the reputations of progressive women. In fact, Victoria Woodhull provided Susan and her associates with a spectacular opportunity to prove the sincerity of their contention that there should not be a double standard of morals, one for men and another for women. According to New York, in May 1871, to a convention of the National Women's Suffrage Association, Susan found that Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Stanton, and Mrs. Davis had invited Victoria Woodhull to address that convention and to sit on the platform between Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Stanton. Through them and others more critical, Susan was brought up to date on the sensational story of Victoria Woodhull, who had been drawing record crowds to her lectures and whose unconventional life continuously provided reporters with interesting copy. Victoria's home, at 15 East 38th Street, resplendent and ornate with gilded furniture and bric-a-brac, housed not only her husband, Colonel Blood, and herself, but her divorced husband and their children as well, and also all of her quarrelsome relatives. Here many radicals, social reformers, and spiritualists gathered, among them Stephen Pearl Andrews, who soon made use of Victoria and her weekly to publicize his dream of a new world order, the Pantarchy, as he called it. Victoria herself was an ardent spiritualist, controlled by the Demosthenes of the spirit world, to whom she believed she owed her most brilliant utterances, and by whom she was guided to announce herself as a presidential candidate in 1872. Needless to say, with such a background, Victoria Woodhull became a very controversial figure among the suffragists. In New York only a few days it was hard for Susan to separate fact from fiction, truth from rumour and animosity. Even Demosthenes did not seem too ridiculous to her, for many of her most respected friends were spiritualists. Nor did Victoria's presidential aspirations trouble her greatly. Presidential candidates had been nothing to brag of, and willingly would she support the right woman for president. If Victoria lived up to the high standard of the Woodhull Memorial, then even she might be that woman. After all it was an era of radical theories and utopian dreams, of extravagances of every sort, almost anything could happen. Whatever doubts the suffragists may have had when they saw Victoria Woodhull on the platform at the New York meeting of the National Association, she swept them all along with her when, as one inspired, she made her great secession speech. If the very next Congress refuses woman all the legitimate results of citizenship, she declared, we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government. We mean treason, we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than what was that of the South. We are plotting revolution, we will overthrow this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead. Susan, who felt deeply her right to full citizenship, who herself had talked revolution, and who had so often listened to the extravagant anti-slavery declarations of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Parker Pillsbury, was not offended by these statements. She was, however, troubled by the attitude of the press, particularly of the Tribune, which labeled this gathering the Woodhull Convention, and accused the suffragists of adopting Mrs. Woodhull's free-love theories. Having experienced so recently the animosity stirred up by her alliance with George Francis Train, Susan resolved to be cautious regarding Victoria Woodhull, and was beginning to wonder if Victoria was not using the suffragists to further her own ambitions. Yet many trusted friends, who had talked with Mrs. Woodhull far more than she had the opportunity to do, were convinced that she was a genius and a prophet, who had risen above the sordid environment of her youth to do a great work for women, and who had the courage to handle subjects which others feared to touch. Free love, for example, Susan well knew, was an epithet hurled indiscriminately at anyone indiscreet enough to argue for less stringent divorce laws, or for an intelligent frank appraisal of marriage and sex. Was it for this reason, Susan asked herself, that Mrs. Woodhull was called a free lover, or did she actually advocate promiscuity? With these questions puzzling her, she left for Rochester and the West. Almost immediately the papers were full of Victoria Woodhull and her family quarrels, which brought her into court. This was a disillusioning experience for the National Woman Suffrage Association, which had so recently featured Victoria Woodhull as a speaker. And Susan began seriously to question the wisdom of further association with this strange, controversial character. Nevertheless, Victoria still had her ardent defenders among the suffragists, particularly Isabella Beecher Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. Even the thoughtful judicious Martha C. Wright wrote Mrs. Hooker at this time, it is not always the wise and prudent to whom the truth is revealed, though far be it from me to imply aught derogatory to Mrs. Woodhull. No one can be with her, see her gentle and modest bearing and her spiritual face, without feeling sure that she is a true woman. Whatever unhappy surroundings may have compromised her. I have never met a stranger toward whom I felt more tenderly drawn in sympathy and love. Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke her mind in Theodore Tilton's new paper, The Golden Age. Victoria C. Woodhull stands before us today, a grand, brave woman, radical alike in political, religious, and social principles. Her face and form indicate the complete triumph in her nature of the spiritual over the sensuous. The processes of her education are little to us. The grand result, everything. Victoria was in dire need of defenders, for the press was venomous, goading her on to revenge. Susan, now traveling westward, lecturing in one state after another, thinking of ways to interest the people in women's suffrage, was too busy and too far away to follow Victoria Woodhull's court battles. Mrs. Stanton met Susan in Chicago late in May, 1871, to join her on a lecture tour of the Far West. Together they headed for Wyoming and Utah, eager to set foot in the states which had been the first to extend suffrage to women. The long, leisurely days on the train gave these two old friends, Susan now 51, and Mrs. Stanton 56, ample time to talk and philosophize, to appraise their past efforts for women and plan their speeches for the days ahead. While their main theme would always be votes for women, they decided that from now on they must also arouse women to rebel against their legal bondage under the man marriage, as they called it, and to face frankly the facts about sex, prostitution, and the double standard of morals. In Utah, in the midst of polygamy fostered by the Mormon Church, they would encounter still another sex problem. After an enthusiastic welcome in Denver, they moved on to Laramie, Wyoming, where one hundred women greeted them as the train pulled in. From this first woman's suffrage state, Susan exultingly wrote, We have been moving over the soil, that is really the land of the free and the home of the brave. Women here can say what a magnificent country is ours, where every class and caste, color and sex may find freedom. They reached Salt Lake City just after the Godby secession, by which a group of liberal Mormons abandoned polygamy. As guests of the Godbees for a week, they had every opportunity to become acquainted with the Mormons, to observe women under polygamy, and to speak in long, all-day sessions to women alone. Susan tried to show her audiences in Utah that her point of attack under both monogamy and polygamy was the subjection of women, and that to remedy this, the self-support of women was essential. In Utah she found little opportunity for women to earn a living for themselves and their children, as there was no manufacturing and there were no free schools in need of teachers. Women here, as everywhere, she declared, must be able to live honestly and honorably without the aid of men, before it can be possible to save the masses of them from entering into polygamy or prostitution, legal or illegal. Some of Susan's critics at home felt she was again besmirching the suffrage cause by setting foot in polygamous Utah. But this was of no moment to her, for she saw the crying need of the right kind of missionary work among Mormon women, no Phariseeism, no shutters of puritanic horror, but a simple, loving, fraternal clasp of hands with these struggling women to encourage them and point the way. Hearing that Susan and Mrs. Stanton were in the West and route to California, Leland Stanford, governor of California, and president of the recently completed Central Pacific Railway, sent them passes for their journey. They reached San Francisco with high hopes that they could win the support of Western men for their demand for women's suffrage under the 14th Amendment. Their welcome was warm and the press friendly. An audience of over 1200 listened with real interest to Mrs. Stanton. Then the two crusaders made a misstep. Eager to learn the woman's side of the case and the recent widely publicized murder of the wealthy attorney Alexander P. Crittenden by Laura Fair, they visited Laura Fair in prison. Immediately the newspapers reported this move in a most critical vein with the result that an uneasy audience crowded into the hall where Susan was to speak on the power of the ballot. As she proceeded to prove that woman needed the ballot to protect themselves and their work and could not count on the support and protection of men, she cited case after case of men's betrayal of women. Then bringing home her point, she declared with vigor, if all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight. Booze and hisses from every part of the hall greeted this statement. But Susan trained on the anti-slavery platform to hold her ground whatever the tumult, waited patiently until this protest subsided, standing before the defiant audience poised and unafraid. Then in a clear steady voice she repeated her challenging words. This time above the hisses she heard a few cheers, and for the third time she repeated, if all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight. Now the audience admiring her courage roared its applause. I declare to you, she concluded, that women must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and here I take my stand. Reading the newspapers the next morning, she found herself accused not only of defending Laura Fair, but of condoning the murder of Crittenden. This story was republished throughout the state and eagerly picked up by the New York newspapers. As it was now impossible for her or Mrs. Stanton to draw a friendly audience anywhere in California, they took refuge in the Yosemite Valley for the next few weeks. Susan was inconsolable. These slanders on top of the loss of the revolution, and the split in the suffrage ranks seemed more than she could bear. Never an all my heart experience have I been under such fire. She confided to her diary. The clouds are so heavy over me. I never before was so cut down. Not until she had spent several days riding horseback in the Yosemite Valley on men's saddles in linen bloomers over long perilous exhausting trails did the clouds begin to lift. Gradually the beauty and grandeur of the mountains and the giant redwoods brought her peace and refreshment, putting to flight all the old six days' story and the six thousand years. Bearing the brunt of the censure in California, Susan expected Mrs. Stanton to come to her defense in letters to the newspapers. When she did not do so, Susan was deeply hurt, for in the past she had so many times smoothed the way for her friend. Even now, on their return to San Francisco, where she herself did not yet dare lecture, she did her best to build up audiences for Mrs. Stanton and to get correct transcripts of her lectures to the papers. Disillusioned and heart-sick, she was for the first time sadly disappointed in her dearest friend. Moving on to Oregon, to lecture at the request of the pioneer suffragist, Abigail Scott Dunaway, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who had left for the East. As I rolled on the ocean last week, feeling that the very next strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my sins of omission and commission, there was nothing undone which haunted me like the failure to speak the word at San Francisco again and more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having said the true and needful thing on lower affair and the social evil, with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from their united eulogies with that one word unsaid. So far Susan's western trip had netted her only three hundred and fifty dollars. This was disappointing in so far as she had counted upon it to reduce substantially her revolution debt. She now hoped to build her earnings up to one thousand dollars in Oregon and Washington. Everywhere in these two states, people took her to their hearts, and the press, with a few exceptions, was complimentary. The beauty of the rugged mountainous country compensated her somewhat for the long, tiring stage rides over rough roads and for the cold, uncomfortable lonely nights and poor hotels. Only occasionally did she enjoy the luxury of a good cup of coffee or a clean bed in a warm, friendly home. At first in Oregon she was apprehensive about facing an audience because of her San Francisco experience, and she wrote Mrs. Stanton, But to the rack I must go, though another San Francisco torture be in store for me. She spoke on the power of the ballot, on women's right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, on the need of women to be self-supporting, and clearly and logically she marshaled her facts and her arguments. Occasionally she obliged with a temperance speech, or gathered women together to talk to them about the social evil, relieved when they responded to this delegate subject with earnestness and gratitude. Practice soon made her an easy extemporaneous speaker. Yet she was only now and then satisfied with her efforts, recording in her diary, was happy in a real Patrick Henry speech. The proceeds from her lectures were disappointing, as money was scarce in the West that winter, and she had just decided to return to the East to spend Christmas with her mother and sisters when she was urged to accept lecture engagements in California. Putting her own personal longings behind her, she took the stage to California, sitting outside with the driver so that she could better enjoy the scenery and learn more about the people who had settled this new, lonely, overpowering country. Horrible indeed are the roads, she wrote her mother, miles and miles of corduroy and then twenty miles of black mud. How my thought does turn homeward, mother. This time she was warmly received in San Francisco, the prejudice so vocal six months before had disappeared. Made my fourteenth amendment argument splendidly, she wrote in her diary, all delighted with it and me, and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that I help the good work on. She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family. I miss Mrs. Stanton. Still, I cannot but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, and set of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her never exhausted magazine. There is no alternative, whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her. Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada, where she also had lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1st, 1872, six months of constant travel, full 8,000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's work, full 13,000 miles travel, 170 meetings. On the train, she met the new California senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey, during which the train was stalled in deep snowdrifts. This is indeed a fearful ordeal, fastened here, midway of the continent, at the top of the Rocky Mountains, she recorded. The railroad has supplied the passengers with soda-crackers and dried fish. Mrs. Sargent and I have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing mothers. The sergeants had brought their own food for the journey and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed heartily in women's rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for the Senate had boldly announced his endorsement of women's suffrage. This friendly attitude among Western men toward votes for women was the most encouraging development in Susan's long uphill fight. These men, looking upon women as partners who had shared with them the dangers and hardships of the frontier, recognized at once the justice of women's suffrage and its benefit to the country. Susan traveled directly from Nevada to Washington instead of breaking her journey by a visit with her brothers in Kansas as she had hoped to do. She even admitted Rochester so that she might be in time for the National Women's Suffrage Convention in Washington in January 1872 for which Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Stanton were preparing. She found Victoria Woodhull with them, her presence provoking criticism and dissension. Impulsively she came to Victoria's defense at the convention. I have been asked by many, why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front? Now bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her memorial to Congress and it was a power. She had an interview with the Judiciary Committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was young, handsome and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after. I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs. Woodhull's antecedents, she continued. I said I didn't and that I did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of Congress. I have been asked along the Pacific Coast, what about Woodhull? You make her your leader. Now we don't make leaders, they make themselves. Victoria, however, did not prove to be the leading light of this convention. Although she made one of her stirring fiery speeches, calling upon her audience to form an equal rights party and nominate her for President of the United States. By this time, Susan had concluded that Victoria Woodhull for President did not ring true, and she would have nothing to do with her self-inspired candidacy. Quickly she steered the convention away from Victoria Woodhull for President toward the consideration of the more practical matter of women's right to vote under the 14th and 15th Amendments. This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the close of the war, Susan reminded the Senators, Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above state power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any state. When the 14th Amendment was first proposed, we rushed to you, with petitions, praying you not to insert the word male in the second clause. Our best friends said to us, the insertion of that word puts no new barrier against women, therefore do not embarrass us, but wait until we get the Negro question settled. So the 14th Amendment with the word male was adopted. When the 15th was presented without the word sex, she continued, we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance to us, and again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war, saying, after we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your case. Have they done as they promised? She asked. When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men say to us to wait the action of Congress and state legislatures in the adoption of a 16th Amendment, which shall make null and void the word male in the 14th, and supply the want of the word sex in the 15th. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a bloody revolution. Unconvinced of the urgency or even the desirability of votes for women, the Senate Judiciary Committee promptly issued an adverse report. But Susan was assured that her cause had a few persistent supporters in Congress when Benjamin Butler presented petitions to the House for a declaratory act for the 14th Amendment, and Congressman Parker of Missouri introduced a bill granting women the right to vote and hold office in the territories. Susan now turned to the more sympathetic West to take her plea for women's suffrage directly to the people. Speaking almost daily in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois, she had little time to think of the work in the East. The glamour of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality who gave only part of herself to the task. When letters came from Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker showing plainly that they were falling in with Victoria's plans to form a new political party, Susan at once dashed off these lines of warning. We have no element out of which to make a political party, because there is not a man who would vote a woman's suffrage ticket if thereby he endangered his Republican, Democratic, working men's or temperance party, and all our time and words and that direction are simply thrown away. My name must not be used to call any such meeting. Then she added, Mrs. Woodhull has the advantage of us because she has the newspaper, and she persistently means to run our craft into her port and none other. If she were influenced by women's spirits and my consent to be a mere sale hoistor for her, but as it is, she is wholly owned and dominated by men's spirits, and I spurn the whole lot of them. A few weeks later, as she looked over the latest copy of Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly, she was horrified to find her name signed to a call to a political convention sponsored by the National Women's Suffrage Association. Immediately, she telegraphed Mrs. Stanton to remove her name and wrote stern indignant letters begging her and Mrs. Hooker not to involve the National Association in Victoria Woodhull's presidential campaign. Although she herself had often called for a new political party while she was publishing the revolution, she was practical enough to recognize that a party formed under Victoria Woodhull's banner was doomed to failure. Returning to New York, she found both Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker still completely absorbed in Victoria's plans, bringing herself up to date once more on the latest developments in the colorful life of Victoria Woodhull. She found that she had been lecturing on the impending revolution to large enthusiastic audiences and that she had again been called into court by her family. Goaded to defiance by an increasingly virulent press, Victoria had also begun to blackmail suffragists who she thought were her enemies, among them Mrs. Bullard, Mrs. Blake, and Mrs. Phelps. This made Susan take steps at once to free the National Association of her influence. When Victoria Woodhull, followed by a crowd of supporters, sailed into the first business session of the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York, announcing that the People's Convention would hold a joint meeting with the suffragists, Susan made it plain that they would do nothing of the kind, as Steinway Hall had been engaged for Woman's Suffrage Convention. With relief, she watched Victoria and her flock leave for a meeting place of their own. Disgruntled at what she called Susan's intolerance, Mrs. Stanton then asked to be relieved of the presidency. Elected to take her place, Susan was now free to cope with Victoria should this again become necessary. Not to be outmaneuvered by Susan, Victoria made a surprise appearance near the end of the evening session and moved that the convention adjourn to meet the next morning in Apollo Hall with the People's Convention. Quickly one of her colleagues seconded the motion. Susan refused to put this motion, standing quietly before the excited audience, stern and somber in her steel gray silk dress. Beside her on the platform, Victoria, intense and vivid, put the motion herself and it was overwhelmingly carried by her friends scattered among the suffragists. Declaring this out of order because neither Victoria nor many of those voting were members of the National Association, Susan in her most commanding voice adjourned the convention to meet in the same place the next morning. Victoria, however, continued her demands until Susan ordered the janitor to turn out the lights. Then the audience dispersed in the darkness. With these drastic measures, Susan rescued the National Woman Suffrage Association from Victoria Woodhall, who had her own triumph later at Apollo Hall where, surrounded by wildly cheering admirers, she was nominated for President of the United States by the newly formed Equal Rights Party. Reading about Victoria's nomination in the morning papers, Susan breathed a prayer of gratitude for a narrow escape, recording in her diary, there never was such a foolish muddle. All come of Mrs. Stanton consulting and conceding to Woodhall and calling a people's convention. All came near being lost. I never was so hurt with the folly of Stanton. Our movement as such is so demoralized by letting go the helm of ship to Woodhall, though we rescued it, it was by a hair breath escape. She was surprised to find no condemnation of her actions in Woodhall and Claflin's weekly, but only the implication that the suffragists were too slow for Victoria's great work. The attitude of some of the leading suffragists toward Victoria Woodhall remained a problem. Fortunately Mrs. Stanton came back into line, but both Mrs. Hooker and Mrs. Davis seemed bound to drift under Victoria's influence, and the promising young lawyer, Belva Lockwood, campaigned for the Equal Rights Party and its candidate, Victoria Woodhall. While Victoria Woodhall's fortunes were speedily dropping from the sublime heights of a presidential nomination to the humiliation of financial ruin, the loss of her home, and the suspended publication of her weekly, Susan was knocking at the doors of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. She had previously appealed to the liberal Republicans, among whose delegates were her old friends George W. Julian, B. Gratz Brown, and Theodore Tilton, but they had ignored women's suffrage and had nominated for president Horace Greeley, now a persistent opponent of votes for women. The Democrats did no better, faced with Grant as the strong Republican nominee, they too nominated Horace Greeley with B. Gratz Brown as his running mate, hoping by this coalition to achieve victory. The Republicans, still unwilling to go the whole way for women's suffrage by giving it the recognition of a plank in their platform, did, however, offer women a splinter at which Susan grasped eagerly, because it was the first time an important powerful political party had ever mentioned women in their platform. The Republican Party, read the splinter, is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom. Their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction, and the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration. Thankful to have escaped involvement with Victoria Woodhull and her equal rights party, just at this time when the Republicans were ready to smile upon women, Susan basked in an aura of respectability thrown around her by her new political allies. She was even hopeful that the two women's suffrage factions could now forget their differences and work together for the living vital issue of today, freedom to women. She at once began speaking for the Republican Party, looking forward to carrying the discussion of women's suffrage into every school district and every ward meeting. In the beginning the Republicans were generous with funds, giving her one thousand dollars for women's meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, and other large cities. For speakers she sought both Lucy Stone and Anna E. Dickinson, but Lucy made it plain in letters to Mrs. Stanton that she would take no part in Republican rallies conducted by Susan, and Anna responded with a torrent of false accusations. Only Mary Livermore of the American Association consented to speak at Susan's Republican rallies, but with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Olympia Brown to call upon, Susan did not lack for effective orators. In an appeal to the Woman of America, financed by the Republicans and widely circulated, she urged the election of Grant and Wilson and the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom she described as women's most bitter opponent. Both by tongue and pen, she declared, he has heaped abuse, ridicule, and misrepresentation upon our leading women, while the whole power of the Tribune had been used to crush our great reform. Beyond this she was unwilling to go in criticizing her one-time friend. In fact her sense of fairness recoiled at the ridicule and defamation heaped upon Horace Greeley in the campaign. I shall not join with the Republicans, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, in hounding Greeley and the Liberals with all the old war anethemas of the democracy. My sense of justice and truth is outraged by the Harper's cartoons of Greeley and the General falsifying tone of the Republican press. It is not fair for us to join in the cry that everybody who was opposed to the present administration is either a Democrat or an apostate. Susan sensed a change in the Republicans' attitude toward women, as they grew increasingly confident of victory. Not only did they refuse further financial aid, but criticized Susan roundly, because in her speeches she emphasized women's suffrage rather than the virtues of the Republican Party. She ignored their complaints and wrote Mrs. Stanton, if you are willing to go forth, saying that you endorse the Party on any other point, then that of its recognition of women's claim to vote, I am not. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 16. Testing the 14th Amendment Susan preached militancy to women throughout the presidential campaign of 1872, urging them to claim their rights under the 14th and 15th Amendments by registering and voting in every state in the Union. Even before Frances Minor had called her attention to the possibilities offered by these Amendments, she had followed with great interest a similar effort by English woman who, in 1867 and 1868, had attempted to prove that the ancient legal rights of females were still valid and entitled women property holders to vote for representatives in Parliament and who claimed that the word man in Parliamentary statutes should be interpreted to include women. In the case of the 5346 householders of Manchester, the Court held that every woman is personally incapable in a legal sense. This legal contest had been fully reported in the Revolution and, disappointing as the verdict was, Susan looked upon this attempt to establish justice as an indication of a great awakening and uprising among women. There had also been heartening signs in her own country, which she hoped were the preparation for more successful militancy to come. She had exalted in the Revolution in 1868 over the attempt of women to vote in Vinland, New Jersey. Encouraged by the enfranchisement of women in Wyoming in 1869, Mary Olney Brown and Charlotte Olney French had cast their votes in Washington Territory. A young widow, Marilla Ricker, had registered and voted in New Hampshire in 1870, claiming this right as a property holder, but her vote was refused. In 1871, Nanette B. Gardner and Catherine Stebbins in Detroit, Catherine V. White in Illinois, Ellen R. Van Valkenburg in Santa Cruz, California, and Carrie S. Burnham in Philadelphia registered and attempted to vote. Only Mrs. Gardner's vote was accepted. That same year, Sarah Andrews Spencer, Sarah E. Webster, and seventy other women marched to the polls to register and vote in the District of Columbia. Their ballots refused, they brought suit against the Board of Election Inspectors, carrying the case unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court of the United States. Another test case, based on the 14th Amendment, had also been carried to the Supreme Court by Myra Bradwell, one of the first woman lawyers who had been denied admission to the Illinois bar because she was a woman. With the spotlight turned on the 14th Amendment by these women, lawyers here and there throughout the country were discussing the legal points involved, many admitting that women had a good case, even the press was friendly. Susan had looked forward to claiming her rights under the 14th and 15th Amendments, and was ready to act. She had spent the 30 days required of voters in Rochester with her family, and as she glanced through the warning paper of November 1st, 1872, she read these challenging words. Now register. If you were not permitted to vote, you would fight for the right, undergo all privations for it, face death for it. This was all the reminder she needed. She would fight for this right. She put on her bonnet and coat, telling her three sisters what she intended to do, asked them to join her, and with them walked briskly to the barbershop where the voters of her ward were registering. Boldly entering the stronghold of men, she asked to be registered. The inspector in charge, Beverly W. Jones, tried to convince her that this was impossible under the laws of New York. She told them she claimed her right to vote not under the New York Constitution, but under the 14th Amendment, and she read him its pertinent lines. Other election inspectors now joined in the argument, but she persisted, until two of them, Beverly W. Jones and Edwin F. Marsh, both Republicans, finally consented to register the four women. This mission accomplished. Susan rounded up 12 more women willing to register. The evening papers spread the sensational news, and by the end of the registration period, fifty Rochester women had joined the ranks of the militants. On Election Day, November 5, 1872, Susan gleefully wrote Elizabeth Stanton, Well, I have gone and done it. Positively voted the Republican ticket. Straight, this a.m. at seven o'clock, and swore my vote in at that. All my three sisters voted. Rhoda de Garmo too. Amy Post was rejected, and she will immediately bring action against the registrars. Not a jeer nor a word. Not a look, disrespectful, has met a single woman. I hope the morning's telegrams will tell of many women all over the country trying to vote. I hope you voted too. Election Day did not bring the general uprising of women for which Susan had hoped. In Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Connecticut, as in Rochester, a few women tried to vote. In New York City, Lily Devereux Blake, and in Fayetteville, New York, Matilda Jocelyn Gage had courageously gone to the polls, only to be turned away. Elizabeth Stanton did not vote on November 5, 1872, and her lack of enthusiasm about a test case in the courts was very disappointing to Susan. However, the fact that Susan B. Anthony had voted won immediate response from the press in all parts of the country. Newspapers in general were friendly. The New York Times boldly declaring, the act of Susan B. Anthony should have a place in history, and the Chicago Tribune venturing to suggest that she ought to hold public office. The cartoonists, however, reveling in a new and tempting subject, caricatured her unmercifully, the New York graphic setting the tone. Some Democratic papers condemned her, following the line of the Rochester Union and Advertiser, which flaunted the headline, Female Lawlessness, and declare that Ms. Anthony's lawlessness had proved women unfit for the ballot. Before she voted, Susan had taken the precaution of consulting Judge Henry R. Selden, a former judge of the Court of Appeals. After listening with interest to her story and examining the arguments of Benjamin Butler, Francis Minor, and Albert G. Riddle in support of the claim that women had a right to vote under the 14th and 15th Amendments, he was convinced that women had a good case, and consented to advise her and defend her if necessary. Judge Selden, now retired from the bench because of ill health, was practicing law in Rochester, where he was highly respected. A Republican, he had served as Lieutenant Governor, Member of the Assembly, and State Senator. Susan had known him as one of the city's active abolitionists, a friend of Frederick Douglass, who had warned him to flee the country after the raid on Harper's Ferry and the capture of John Brown. Such a man she felt she could trust. All was quiet for about two weeks after the election, and it looked as if the episode might be forgotten in the jubilation over Grant's election. Then, on November 18th, the United States Deputy Marshal rang the doorbell at 7 Madison Street, and asked for Ms. Susan B. Anthony. When she greeted him, he announced with embarrassment that he had come to arrest her. Is this your usual manner of serving a warrant? she asked in surprise. He then handed her papers, charging that she had voted in violation of Section 19 of an Act of Congress, which stipulated that anyone voting knowingly without having the lawful right to vote was guilty of a crime, and on conviction would be punished by a fine not exceeding five hundred dollars or by imprisonment not exceeding three years. This was a serious development. It had never occurred to Susan that this law, passed in 1870, to halt the voting of Southern rebels, could actually be applicable to her. In fact, she had expected to bring suit against election inspectors for refusing to accept the ballots of women. Now charged with crime and arrested, she suddenly began to sense the import of what was happening to her. When the Marshal suggested that she report alone to the United States Commissioner, she emphatically refused to go of her own free will, and they left the house together, she extending her wrists for the handcuffs and he ignoring her gesture. As they got on the streetcar, and the conductor asked for her fare, she further embarrassed the Marshal by loudly announcing, I'm traveling at the expense of the government. This gentleman is escorting me to jail. Ask him for my fare. When they arrived at the Commissioner's office, he was not there, but a hearing was set for November 29. On that day, in the office where a few years before, fugitive slaves had been returned to their masters, Susan was questioned and cross-examined, and she felt akin to those slaves. Proudly she admitted that she had voted, that she had conferred with Judge Selden, that with or without his advice, she would have attempted to vote to test women's right to the franchise. Did you have any doubt yourself of your right to vote? Asked the Commissioner. Not a particle, she replied. On December 23, 1872, in Rochester's Common Council Chamber, before a large curious audience, Susan, the other women voters and the election inspectors were arraigned. People expecting to see bold notoriety-seeking women were surprised by their seriousness and dignity. The majority of these lawbreakers, reported the press, were elderly, matronly-looking women with thoughtful faces, just the sort one would like to see in charge of one's sick room, considerate, patient, kindly. The United States commissioner fixed their bail at five hundred dollars each. All furnished bail, but Susan, who through her council, Henry R. Selden, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, demanding immediate release and challenging the lawfulness of her arrest. When a writ of habeas corpus was denied and her bail increased to one thousand dollars by United States District Judge Nathan K. Hall sitting in Albany, Susan was more than ever determined to resist the interference of the courts in her constitutional right as a citizen to vote. She refused to give bail, emphatically stating that she preferred prison. Seeing no heroism but only disgrace and a jail term for his client and unwilling to let her bring this ignimony upon herself, Henry Selden chivalrously assured her that this was a time when she must be guided by her lawyer's advice, and he paid her bail. Ignorant of the technicalities of the law, she did not realize the far-reaching implications of this well-intentioned act, until they had left the courtroom and in the hallway met tall, vigorous John Van Voorhees of Rochester, who was working on the case with Judge Selden. With the impatience of a younger man, eager to fight to the finish, he exclaimed, You have lost your chance to get your case before the Supreme Court by writ of habeas corpus. Aghast, Susan rushed back to the courtroom, hoping to cancel the bond, but it was too late. Bitterly disappointed, she remonstrated with Henry Selden, but he quietly replied, I could not see a lady I respected in jail. She never forgave him for this, and spite of her continued appreciation of his keen legal mind, his unfailing kindness and his willingness to battle for women. Within a few days she appeared before the federal grand jury in Albany, and was indicted on the charge that she did knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully, vote for a representative in the Congress of the United States. Her trial was set for the term of the United States District Court, beginning May 13, 1873, in Rochester, New York. During these difficult days in Albany, Susan found comfort and courage, as in the past, in the friendliness of Lydia Mott's home. Here she planned the steps by which to win public approval and financial aid for her test case. She addressed the Commission, which was revising New York's Constitution on Women's Right to Vote, under the 14th and 15th Amendments, pointing out that the law limiting suffrage to males was nullified by this new interpretation. Eager to spread the truth about her own legal contest, she distributed printed copies of Judge Seldon's argument. Then traveling to New York and Washington, she personally presented copies to newspaper editors and congressmen. To one of these men, she wrote, It is not for myself, but for all womanhood. Yes, and all manhood, too, that I most rejoice in the appeal to the legal mind of the nation. It is no longer whether women wish to vote or men are willing, but it is women's constitutional right. In spite of the fact that Susan was technically in the custody of the United States Marshal, who objected to her leaving Rochester, she managed to carry out a full schedule of lectures in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and also the usual annual Washington and New York women's suffrage conventions at which she told the story of her voting, her arrest, and her pending trial, and where she received enthusiastic support. Because she wanted the people to understand the legal points on which she based her right to vote, Susan spoke on the equal right of all citizens to the ballot in every district in Monroe County. So thorough and convincing was she that the district attorney asked for a change of venue, fearing that any Monroe County jury sitting in Rochester would be prejudiced in her favor. When her case was transferred to the United States Circuit Court in Canada to be heard a month later, she immediately descended upon Ontario County with her speech, Is it a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote? And Matilda Jocelyn Gage joined her, speaking on the United States on Trial, not Susan B. Anthony. On the lecture platform Susan wore a gray silk dress with a soft white lace collar. Her hair, now graying, was smoothed back and twisted neatly into a tight knot. Everything about her indicated refinement and sincerity and most of her audience felt this. Our Democratic Republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and vote in making and executing the laws, she declared, as she looked into the faces of the men and women who had gathered to hear her, farmers, storekeepers, lawyers, and housewives, rich and poor, a cross-section of America. Repeating to them salient passages from the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution, she added, It was we the people, not we the white male citizens, nor yet we the male citizens, but we the whole people who formed this union, and we formed it not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them, not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people, women as well as men. She asked, Quoting for them the 15th Amendment, she told them it had settled for ever the question of the citizens' right to vote. The 15th Amendment, she reasoned, applies to women, first because women are citizens, and secondly because of their previous condition of servitude. Defining a slave as a person robbed of the proceeds of his labor and subject to the will of another, she showed how state laws relating to married women had placed them in the position of slaves. As she analyzed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and cited authorities for her conclusions, she left little doubt in the minds of those who heard her that women were persons and citizens whose privileges and immunities could not be abridged. On this note, she concluded, We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of guilty, against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections. We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for doubt, to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human rights unconstitutional. And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot, all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently, through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law. Speaking twenty-one nights in succession was arduous. So few see or feel any special importance in the impending trial, she jotted down in her diary. In towns such as Geneva, where she had old friends like Elizabeth Smith Miller, she was assured of a friendly welcome and a good audience. As the collections, taken up after her lectures, were too small to pay her expenses, her financial problems weighed heavily. The notes she had signed for the revolution were in the main still unpaid, and one of her creditors was growing impatient. She had recently paid her counsel, Judge Selden, two hundred dollars, and John Van Voorhees, seventy-five dollars, leaving only three dollars and forty-five cents in her defense fund. But as usual, a few of her loyal friends came to her aid, and both Judge Selden and John Van Voorhees, deeply interested in her courageous fight, gave most of their time without charge. If this campaign was a problem financially, it was a success in the matter of nationwide publicity. The New York Herald exalted and hostile jibes at women's suffrage and published fictitious interviews ridiculing Susan as a homely, aggressive old maid. But the New York Evening Post prophesied that the court decision would likely be in her favor. The Rochester Express championed her warmly. All Rochester will assert, at least all of it worth heeding, that Miss Anthony holds here the position of a refined and estimable woman, thoroughly respected and beloved by the large circle of staunch friends who swear by her common sense and loyalty, if not by her peculiar views. In fact, the consensus of opinion in Rochester was much like that of the woman who remarked, No, I am not converted to what these women advocate. I am too cowardly for that, but I am converted to Susan B. Anthony. This, however, was far from the attitude of Lucy Stone's woman's journal, which had ignored Susan's voting in November 1872 because it was out of sympathy with this militant move and with her interpretation of the 14th and 15th Amendments. Later, as her case progressed in the courts, the journal did give it brief notice as a news item. But in 1873, when it listed as a mark of honor the woman who had worked wisely for the cause, Susan B. Anthony's name was not among them. And this did not pass unnoticed by Susan, nor did the fact that she was snubbed by the Congress of Woman, meeting in New York, and sponsored by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Maria Mitchell. This drawing away of woman hurt her far more than newspaper jibes. In fact, she was sadly disappointed in woman's response to the Herculean effort she was making for them. Even more disconcerting was the adverse decision of the Supreme Court on the Myra-Bradwell case, which at once shattered the confidence of most of her legal advisors. The Court held that Illinois had violated no provision of the Federal Constitution in refusing to allow Myra Bradwell to practice law because she was a woman, and declared that the right to practice law in state courts is not a privilege or an immunity of a citizen of the United States, nor is the power of a state to prescribe qualifications for admission to the bar affected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, filing a dissenting opinion, lived up to Susan's faith in him. But Benjamin Butler wrote her, I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens. But the difficulty is, the Court's long since decided that the constitutional provisions do not act upon the citizens except as guarantees exproprio vagore, and in order to give force to them, there must be legislation. Therefore, the point is for the friends of women's suffrage to get congressional legislation. Susan, however, never wavered in her conviction that she as a citizen had a constitutional right to vote, and that it was her duty to test this right in the courts. End of Chapter 16 Chapter 17 of Susan B. Anthony by Alma Lutz This Lieber-Vox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 17. Is it a crime for a citizen to vote? Charged with the crime of voting illegally, Susan was brought to trial on June 17, 1873, in the peaceful village of Canadegua, New York. Simply dressed and wearing her new bonnet, faced with blue silk, and draped with a dotted veil, she stoically climbed the courthouse steps, feeling as if on her shoulders she carried the political destiny of American women. With her were her counsel Henry R. Selden and John Van Voorhees, her sister Hannah Moser, most of the women who had voted with her in Rochester, and Matilda Jocelyn Gage, whose interest in this case was akin to her own. In the courtroom on the second floor, seated behind the bar, Susan watched the curious crowd gather and fill every available seat. She wondered, as she calmly surveyed the all-male jury, whether they could possibly understand the humiliation of a woman who had been arrested for exercising the rights of a citizen. The judge, Ward Hunt, did not promise well, for he had only recently been appointed to the bench through the influence of his friend and townsman Roscoe Conkling, the undisputed leader of the Republican Party in New York, and a bitter opponent of women's suffrage. She tried to fathom this small, white-haired, colorless judge, upon whose fairness so much depended. Prim and Stolid, he sat before her, faultlessly dressed in a suit of black broadcloth, his neck wound with an immaculate white neckcloth. He ruled against her at once, refusing to let her testify on her own behalf. She was completely satisfied, however, as she listened to Henry Selden's presentation of her case. Tall and commanding, he stood before the court with nobility and kindness in his face and eyes, bringing to mind a handsome, cultured Lincoln. So logical, so just was his reasoning, so impressive were his citations of the law, that it seemed to her they must convince the jury and even the expressionless judge on the bench. Pointing out that the only alleged ground of the illegality of Miss Anthony's vote was that she was a woman, Henry Selden declared, if the same act had been done by her brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only innocent and laudable but honorable, but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime. I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned in a criminal court merely on account of her sex. He claimed that Miss Anthony had voted in good faith, believing that the United States Constitution gave her the right to vote, and he clearly outlined her interpretation of the 14th and 15th Amendments, declaring that she stood arraigned as a criminal simply because she took the only step possible to bring this great constitutional question before the courts. After he had finished, Susan followed closely for two long hours the arguments of the District Attorney, Richard Crowley, who contended that whatever her intentions may have been, good or bad, she had by her voting violated a law of the United States and was therefore guilty of the crime. At the close of the District Attorney's argument Judge Hunt, without leaving the bench, drew out a written document, and to her surprise read from it as he addressed the jury. The right of voting, or the privilege of voting, he declared, is a right or privilege arising under the Constitution of the State, not of the United States. The legislature of the State of New York, he continued, has seen fit to say that the franchise of voting shall be limited to the male sex. If the 15th Amendment had contained the word sex, the argument of the defendant would have been potent. The 14th Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting of Ms. Anthony was in violation of the law. There was no ignorance of any fact, he added, but all the facts being known, she undertook to settle a principle in her own person, to constitute a crime, it is true, that there must be a criminal intent, but it is equally true that knowledge of the facts of the case is always held to supply this intent. Then, hesitating a moment, he concluded, upon this evidence, I suppose, there is no question for the jury, and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty. Immediately Henry Selden was on his feet, addressing the judge, requesting that the jury determine whether or not the defendant was guilty of crime. Judge Hunt, however, refused, and firmly announced, the question, gentlemen of the jury, and the form it finally takes, is wholly a question, or questions of law, and I have decided, as a question of law, in the first place, that under the 14th Amendment, which Ms. Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote. And I have decided also, he continued, that her belief, and the advice which she took, does not protect her and the act which she committed. If I am right in this, the result must be a verdict on your part of guilty, and therefore I direct, that you find a verdict of guilty. Again Henry Selden was on his feet. That is a direction, he declared, that no court has power to make in a criminal case. The courtroom was tense. Susan, watching the jury, and wondering if they would meekly submit to his will, heard the judge, tersely order, take the verdict, Mr. Clerk. Gentlemen of the jury, entoned the clerk. Harken to your verdict, as the court has recorded it. You say you find the defendant guilty of the offense, whereof she stands indicted, and so say you all. Claiming exception to the direction of the court, that the jury find a verdict of guilty, in this a criminal case, Henry Selden asked that the jury be polled. To this, Judge Hunt abruptly replied, No. Gentlemen of the jury, you are discharged. That night Susan recorded her estimate of Judge Hunt's verdict in her diary in one terse sentence. The greatest outrage history ever witnessed. The New York Son, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and the Candidaigua Times were indignant over Judge Hunt's failure to pold the jury. Judge Hunt, commented the Son, allowed the jury to be impaneled and sworn, and to hear the evidence. But when the case had reached the point of rendering the verdict, he directed a verdict of guilty. He thus denied a trial by jury to an accused party in his court. And either through malice, which we do not believe, or through ignorance, which in such a flagrant degree is equally culpable in a judge, he violated one of the most important provisions of the Constitution of the United States. The privilege of polling the jury has been held to an absolute right in this state, and it is a substantial right. Claiming that the defendant had been denied her right of trial by jury, Henry Selden the next day moved for a new trial. Judge Hunt denied the motion, and ordering the defendant to stand up, asked her, Has the prisoner anything to say, why sentence shall not be pronounced? Yes, your honor, Susan replied, I have many things to say, for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. Impatiently Judge Hunt protested that he could not listen to a rehearsal of arguments which her counsel had already presented. May it please your honor, she persisted, I am not arguing the question, but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot injustice be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen's right to vote is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers. The court cannot allow the prisoner to go on, interrupted Judge Hunt, but Susan, ignoring his command to sit down, protested that her prosecutors and the members of the jury were all her political sovereigns. Again Judge Hunt tried to stop her, but she was not to be put off. She was pleading for all women, and her voice rang out to every corner of the courtroom. The court must insist, declared Judge Hunt, the prisoner has been tried according to established forms of law. Yes, your honor, admitted Susan, but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men in favor of men and against women. The court orders the prisoner to sit down, shouted Judge Hunt, it will not allow another word. On heeding Susan continued, When I was brought before your honor for trial, I hoped for a broad and liberal interpretation of the Constitution and its recent amendments that should declare all United States citizens under its protecting aegis, that should declare equality of rights the national guarantee to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. By failing to get this justice, failing even to get a trial by a jury not of my peers, I asked not leniency at your hands, but rather the full rigors of the law. Once more Judge Hunt tried to stop her, and acquiescing at last she sat down, only to be ordered by him to stand up, as he pronounced her sentence, a fine of one hundred dollars and the costs of prosecution. May it please your honor, she protested, I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock and trade I possess is a ten thousand dollar debt, incurred by publishing my paper, The Revolution, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprisen, and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government. I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Pouring cold water on this blaze of oratory, Judge Hunt tersely remarked that the court would not require her imprisonment pending the payment of her fine. This shrewd move, obviously planned in advance, made it impossible to carry the case to the United States Supreme Court by writ of habeas corpus. That same afternoon Susan was on hand for the trial of the three election inspectors. This time Judge Hunt submitted the case to the jury, but with explicit instructions that the defendants were guilty. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the inspectors denied a new trial where each fined $25 and costs. Two of them, Edwin F. Marsh and William B. Hall, refused to pay their fines and were sent to jail. Susan appealed on their behalf to Senator Sargent in Washington, who eventually secured a pardon for them from President Grant. He also presented a petition to the Senate in January 1874 to remit Susan's fine, as did William Lauffridge of Iowa to the House, but the Judiciary Committees reported adversely. Because neither of these cases had been decided on the basis of national citizenship and the right of a citizen to vote, Susan was heart-sick. To have them relegated to the category of election fraud was as if her high purpose had been trailed in the dust. Wishing to spread reliable information about her trial and the legal questions involved, she had three thousand copies of the court proceedings printed for distribution. It was hard for her to concede that justice for women could not be secured in the courts, but there seemed to be no way in the face of the cold letter of the law to take her case to the Supreme Court of the United States. This would have been possible on writ of habeas corpus had Judge Hunt sentenced her to prison for failure to pay her fine, but this he carefully avoided. Even that intrepid fighter John Van Voorhees could find no loophole, and another of her loyal friends in the legal profession, Albert G. Riddle, wrote her, There is not, I think, the slightest hope from the courts, and just as little from the politicians. They will never take up this cause, never. Individuals will, parties never, till the thing is done. The trouble is that man can govern alone, and that, though woman has the right, man wants to do it, and if she wait for him to ask her, she will never vote. Either man must be made to see and feel the need of woman's help in the great field of human government, and so demand it, or woman must arise and come forward as she never has and take her place. The case of Virginia Minor of St. Louis still held out a glimmer of hope. She had brought suit against an election inspector for his refusal to register her as a voter in the presidential election of 1872, and the case of Minor v. Happerset reached the United States Supreme Court in 1874. An adverse decision on March 29, 1875, delivered by Chief Justice Waite, a friend of women's suffrage, was a bitter blow to Susan, and to all those who had pinned their faith on a more liberal interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Carefully studying the decision, Susan tried to fathom its reasoning, so foreign to her own ideas of justice. Sex, she read, has never been made as one of the elements of citizenship in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment did not affect the citizenship of women any more than it did of men. The direct question is, therefore, presented whether all citizens are necessarily voters. She read on. The Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens. In this case, we need not determine what they are, but only whether suffrage is necessarily one of them. It certainly is nowhere made in so express terms. When the Constitution of the United States was adopted, all the several states, with the exception of Rhode Island, had constitutions of their own. We find in no state were all citizens permitted to vote. Women were excluded from suffrage, and nearly all the states, by the express provision of their constitutions and laws. No new state has ever been admitted to the Union, which has conferred the right of suffrage upon women. And this has never been considered valid objection to her admission. On the contrary, the right of suffrage was withdrawn from women as early as 1807 in the state of New Jersey, without any attempt to obtain the interference of the United States to prevent it. Since then, the governments of the insurgent states have been reorganized under a requirement that, before their representatives could be admitted to seats in Congress, they must have adopted new constitutions, Republican inform. In no one of these constitutions was suffrage conferred upon women, and yet the states have all been restored to their original position as states in the Union. Certainly, if the courts can consider any question settled, this is one. Our province, concluded Chief Justice Waite, is to decide what the law is, not to declare what it should be. Being unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone, and that the constitutions and laws of the several states which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void, we affirm the judgment of the court below. A state's right document, Susan called this decision, as she scored it as inconsistent with the policies of a Republican administration which, through the Civil War amendments, had established federal control over the rights and privileges of citizens. If the Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage, she asked herself, why does it define the qualifications of those voting for members of the House of Representatives? How about the enfranchisement of Negroes by Federal Amendment, or the enfranchisement of foreigners? Why did the Federal Government interfere in her case, instead of leaving it in the hands of the State of New York? Like most abolitionists, Susan had always regarded the principles of the Declaration of Independence as underlying the Constitution, and as the essence of constitutional law. In her opinion, the interpretation of the Constitution in the Virginia Minor case was not only out of harmony with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, but also contrary to the wise counsel of the great English jurist Sir Edward Koch who said, whenever the question of liberty runs doubtful, the decision must be given in favor of liberty. In the face of such a ruling by the highest court in the land, she was helpless. Women were shut out of the Constitution and denied its protection. From here on there was only one course to follow, to press again for a sixteenth amendment to enfranchise women.