Words Worth Remembering: Anthony’s Trial Speech
Held June 17-18, 1873, in Canandaigua, New York, United States v. Susan B. Anthony was, as the Rochester Evening Express put it, “a great National trial” meant to “settle a principle.”
The logic of the New Departure, a campaign within the suffrage movement made popular by Virginia Minor and Victoria Woodhull, was, though novel to many, evident to some. If the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments established citizenship and extended voting rights because of that citizenship, then women already possessed the right to vote. State laws prohibiting women from voting were, in this view, unconstitutional and, therefore, void ab initio, to be ignored and cast aside.
Anthony, entirely devoted to the legal soundness of the New Departure, voted on Tuesday, November 5, 1872, casting her votes in Rochester, New York, for the Grand Old Party and the presidential ticket of incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant and his new running mate, the pro-suffrage Henry Wilson of Massachusetts.
“I have gone and done it!” she wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton later that morning. “I hope you voted too.”
Two weeks after she voted, a federal officer knocked on Anthony’s door, informing her that she was under arrest for illegally casting ballots “without having a lawful right.”
Indicted in January 1873 and awaiting trial, Anthony embarked on a speaking tour, delivering a speech again, and again titled, “Is It a Crime for a U.S. Citizen to Vote?”
“The right of voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights are protected,” Anthony said, reading from Thomas Paine’s 1795 “Dissertation on the First Principles of Government.”
“To take away this right is to reduce man” – including, by definition, women – “to a state of slavery.”
During the trial, Anthony’s lawyer, the prominent Henry Selden, repeated the logic of the New Departure in his defense. He also claimed that Anthony could not be guilty of a crime – of knowingly violating the law – because she sincerely understood the Constitution to grant women voting rights.
Unswayed, Judge Ward Hunt delivered a suspiciously pre-written opinion in which he denied any construction of the Constitution granting women the right to vote. “She voluntarily gave a vote which was illegal,” Hunt concluded, “and thus is subject to the penalty of the law.”
In a controversial decision, Hunt directed the jury to render a guilty verdict since there was, in his estimate, no question for them to decide. Selden immediately protested Hunt’s directions, arguing that they violated Anthony’s Sixth Amendment right to a trial by jury. Hunt rejected Selden’s motion for a new trial.
What followed is one of American history’s most significant yet little-known rhetorical barrages.
“Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced?” Hunt asked.
Anthony didn’t hesitate. “Yes, your honor, 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, are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex are, by your honor’s verdict, doomed to political subjection under this so-called republican government.”
“The Court can not listen to a rehearsal of arguments,” Hunt said.
“I am not arguing the question,” Anthony shot back, “but simply setting the reasons why sentence can not, in justice, 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,” she pressed, “the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of peers as an offender against law; therefore, the denial of my sacred rights to life, liberty, property, and—”
“The Court can not allow the prisoner to go on,” Hunt interrupted.
“But your honor will not deny me this one and only poor privilege of protest against this high-handed outrage,” Anthony said.
“The prisoner must sit down,” Hunt said.
Undeterred, Anthony continued. “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.
“But failing to get this justice—failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers—I ask not leniency at your hands—but rather the full rigors of the law.”
When Anthony finally sat down, Hunt ordered that she rise again to receive her sentence: a fine of $100 plus costs.
“I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” Anthony said. “And 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.’”
Anthony, in fact, never paid a cent, and in 1895 the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts have no authority to direct a guilty verdict in a criminal trial, thus invalidating Hunt’s instructions and, it seems, the entire verdict.
Despite its hopeful rise to prominence, the New Departure fell as quickly as it rose. In 1875, the Supreme Court in Minor v. Happersett unanimously rejected the notion that citizenship confers voting rights, let alone to women, forcing the suffrage movement to retreat into the grueling struggle to win rights state-by-state and territory by territory.
“Protests are no longer worth the paper they are written on,” Anthony wrote weeks after her verdict. “Downright resistance, the actual throwing of the tea overboard, is now the word and work.”
Anthony’s remarks, spoken with righteous fire in a courtroom on a forgotten date, stand as an inspiring reminder of the courage and struggle required to secure the fullest realization of the American ideals.
New York’s Daily Graphic put it best when it described Anthony as “The Woman Who Dared.”