Susan B. Anthony is not on trial; the United States is on trial."--Matilda Joslyn Gage

More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared "that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage." Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving speeches, petitioning Congress and state legislatures, publishing a feminist newspaper--all for a cause that would not succeed until the ratification of the Nieenth Amendment fourteen years after her death in 1906.

She would, however, once he the satisfaction of seeing her pleted ballot drop through the opening of a ballot box. It happened in Rochester, New York on November 5, 1872, and the event--and the trial for illegal voting that followed--would create an opportunity for Anthony to spread her arguments for women suffrage to a wider audience than ever before.

The Vote

Anthony had been planning to vote long before 1872. She would later state that "I he been resolved for three years to vote at the first election when I had been home for thirty days before." (New York law required legal voters to reside for the thirty days prior to the election in the district where they offered their vote.) Anthony had taken the position--and argued it wherever she could--that the recently adopted Fourteenth Amendment ge women the constitutional right to vote in federal elections. The Amendment said that "all persons born and naturalized in the United States...are citizens of the United States," and as citizens were entitled to the "privileges" of citizens of the United States. To Anthony's way of thinking, those privileges certainly included the right to vote.

On November 1, 1872, Anthony and her three sisters entered a voter registration office set up in a barbershop. The four Anthony women were part of a group of fifty women Anthony had anized to register in her home town of Rochester. As they entered the barbershop, the women saw stationed in the office three young men serving as registrars. Anthony walked directly to the election inspectors and, as one of the inspectors would later testify, "demanded that we register them as voters."

The election inspectors refused Anthony's request, but she persisted, quoting the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship provision and the article from the New York Constitution pertaining to voting, which contained no sex qualification. The registers remained unmoved. Finally, according to one published account, Anthony ge the men an argument that she thought might catch their attention: "If you refuse us our rights as citizens, I will bring charges against you in Criminal Court and I will sue each of you personally for large, exemplary damages!" She added, "I know I can win. I he Judge Selden as a lawyer. There is any amount of money to back me, and if I he to, I will push to the 'last ditch' in both courts."

The stunned inspectors discussed the situation. They sought the advice of the Supervisor of elections, Daniel Warner, who, according to thirty-three-year-old election inspector E. T. Marsh, suggested that they allow the women to take the oath of registry. "Young men," Marsh quoted Warner as saying, "do you know the penalty of law if you refuse to register these names?" Registering the women, the registrars were advised, "would put the entire onus of the affair on them." Following Warner's advice, the three inspectors voted to allow Anthony and her three sisters were registered to vote in Rochester's eighth ward. Testifying later about the registration process, Anthony remembered "it was a full hour" of debate "between the supervisors, the inspectors, and myself." In all, fourteen Rochester women successfully registered that day, leading to calls in one city paper for the arrest of the voting inspectors who plied with the women's demand. The Rochester Union and Advertiser editorialized in its November 4 edition: "Citizenship no more carries the right to vote that it carries the power to fly to the moon...If these women in the Eighth Ward offer to vote, they should be challenged, and if they take the oaths and the Inspectors receive and deposit their ballots, they should all be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."

Soon after the polls opened at the West End News Depot on Election Day, November 5, Anthony and seven or eight other women cast their ballots. Inspectors voted tw

o to one to accept Anthony's vote, and her folded ballot was deposited in a ballot box by one of the inspectors. Inspector E. T. Marsh testified later as to feeling caught between a rock and a hard place: "Decide which way we might, we were liable to prosecution. We were expected...to make an infallible decision, inside of two days, of a question in which some of the best minds of the country are divided." Seven or eight more women of Rochester successfully voted in the afternoon. Anthony's vote went to U. S. Grant and other Republicans, based on that party's promise to give the demands of women a respectful hearing. Later that day, Anthony would write of her acplishment to her close friend and fellow suffragist, Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

Dear Mrs Stanton

Well I he been he was obliged to pay the fare of any criminal he arrested. Well, that was the first cents worth I ever had from Uncle Sam.

Anthony was escorted to the office of missioner Storrs, described by Anthony as "the same dingy little room where, in the olden days, fugitive sles were examined and returned to their masters." Upon arriving, Anthony was surprised to learn that among those arrested for their activities on November 5 were not only the fourteen other women voters, but also the ballot inspectors who had authorized their votes.

Anthony's lawyers refused to enter a plea at the time of her arrest, and Storrs scheduled a preliminary examination for November 29. At the hearing on the 29th, plainant Sylvestor Lewis and Eighth Ward Inspectors appeared as the chief witnesses against Anthony. Anthony was questioned at the hearing by one of her lawyers, John Van Voorhis. Van Voorhis tried to establish through his questions that Anthony believed that she had a legal right to vote and therefore had not violated the 1870 Enforcement Act, which prohibited only willful and knowing illegal votes. Anthony testified that she had sought legal advice from Judge Henry R. Selden prior to casting her vote, but that Selden said "he had not studied the question." Van Voorhis asked: "Did you he any doubt yourself of your right to vote?" Anthony replied, "Not a particle." Storrs adjourned the case to December 23.

After listening to legal arguments in December, missioner Storrs concluded that Anthony probably violated the law. When Anthony--alone among those charged with Election Day offenses--refused bail, Storrs ordered her held in the custody of a deputy marshal until the grand jury had a chance to meet in January and consider issuing an indictment. Anthony saw the missioner's decision as a ticket to Supreme Court review, and began making plans with her lawyers to file a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. In a December 26 letter, Anthony wrote confidently, "We shall be rescued from the Marshall hands on a Writ of Habeas Corpus--& case carried to the Supreme Court of the U. S.--the speediest process of getting there." Already letters were ing in with contributions to her "Defense Fund." She was anxious to put the money to use.

By early January, Anthony was already trying to make political hay out of her arrest. She sent off "hundreds of papers" concerning her arrest to suffragist friends and politicians. She still, however, found her situation difficult to prehend: "I never dreamed of the U. S. officers prosecuting me for voting--thought only that if I was refused I should bring action against the inspectors-- But "Uncle Sam" waxes wroth with holy indignation at such violation of his laws!!"

Anthony's attorney, Henry Selden asked a U. S. District Judge in Albany, Nathan Hall, to issue a writ of habeas corpus ordering the release of Anthony from the marshal's custody. Hall denied Selden's request and said he would "allow defendant to go to the Supreme Court of the United States." The judge then raised Anthony's bail from  500 to  1000. Anthony again refused to pay. Selden, however, decided to pay Anthony's bail with money from his own bank account. In the courtroom hallway following the hearing Anthony's other lawyer, John Van Voorhis, told Anthony that Selden's decision to pay her bail meant "you've lost your chance to get your case before the Supreme Court." Shaken by the news, Anthony confronted her lawyer, demanding that he explain why he paid her bail. "I could not see a lady I respected put in jail," Selden answered.

A disappointed Anthony still had a trial to face. On January 24, 1873, a grand jury of twenty men returned an indictment against Anthony charging her with "knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully" voting for a member of Congress "without hing a lawful right to vote,....the said Susan B. Anthony being then and there a person of the female sex." The trial was set for May.