Part 45

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 Voorhis, 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 vs. Happersett reached the United States Supreme Court in 1874. An adverse decision, on March 29, 1875, delivered by Chief Justice Waite, a friend of woman 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 of one of the elements of citizenship in the United States.... The XIV 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 so in 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 in 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 in form. 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 any one, 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 states-rights document," Susan called this decision and 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 Coke, 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.

FOOTNOTES:

Ms., Diary, April 26, 1873.

Trial, p. 17.

Ibid., pp. 62-68.

Ms., Diary, June 18, 1873.

Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook, 1873, Library of Congress.

Trial, pp. 81-85.

This booklet also included the speeches of Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, delivered prior to the trial, and a short appraisal of the trial, Judge Hunt and the Right of Trial by Jury, by John Hooker, the husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle called the booklet "the most important contribution yet made to the discussion of woman suffrage from a legal standpoint." The Woman's Suffrage Journal, IV, Aug. 1, 1873, p. 121, published in England by Lydia Becker, said: "The American law which makes it a criminal offense for a person to vote who is not legally qualified appears harsh to our ideas."

Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 455-456.

History of Woman Suffrage, II, pp. 737-739, 741-742.

Trial, p. 191.

SOCIAL PURITY

Militancy among the suffragists continued to flare up here and there in resistance to taxation without representation. Abby Kelley Foster's home in Worcester was sold for taxes for a mere fraction of its worth, while in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Abby and Julia Smith's cows and personal property were seized for taxes. Both Dr. Harriot K. Hunt in Boston and Mary Anthony in Rochester continued their tax protests. Much as Susan admired this spirited rebellion, she recognized that these militant gestures were but flames in the wind unless they had behind them a well-organized, sustained campaign for a Sixteenth Amendment, and this she could not undertake until The Revolution debt was paid. Nor was there anyone to pinch-hit for her since Ernestine Rose had returned to England and Mrs. Stanton gave all her time to Lyceum lectures.

At the moment the prospect looked bleak for woman suffrage. In Congress, there was not the slightest hope of the introduction of or action on a Sixteenth Amendment. In the states, interest was kept alive by woman suffrage bills before the legislatures, and year by year, with more people recognizing the inherent justice of the demand, the margin of defeat grew smaller. Whenever these state contests were critical, Susan managed to be on hand, giving up profitable lecture engagements to speak without fees; in Michigan in 1874 and in Iowa in 1875, she made new friends for the cause but was unable to stem the tide of prejudice against granting women the vote. After the defeat in Michigan, she wrote in her diary, "Every whisky maker, vendor, drinker, gambler, every ignorant besotted man is against us, and then the other extreme, every narrow, selfish religious bigot."

A new militant movement swept the country in 1874, starting in small Ohio towns among women who were so aroused over the evil influence of liquor on husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers, that they gathered in front of saloons to sing and pray, hoping to persuade drunkards to reform and saloon keepers to close their doors. Out of this uprising, the Women's Christian Temperance Union developed, and within the next few years was organized into a powerful reform movement by a young schoolteacher from Illinois, Frances E. Willard.

A lifelong advocate of temperance, Susan had long before reached the conclusion that this reform could not be achieved by a strictly temperance or religious movement, but only through the votes of women. Nevertheless, she lent a helping hand to the Rochester women who organized a branch of the W.C.T.U., but she told them just how she felt: "The best thing this organization will do for you will be to show you how utterly powerless you are to put down the liquor traffic. You can never talk down or sing down or pray down an institution which is voted into existence. You will never be able to lessen this evil until you have votes."

As she traveled through the West for the Lyceum Bureau, she did what she could to stimulate interest in a federal woman suffrage amendment, speaking out of a full heart and with sure knowledge on "Bread and the Ballot" and "The Power of the Ballot," earning on the average $100 a week, which she applied to the Revolution debt.

Lyceum lecturers were now at the height of their popularity,--particularly in the West, where in the little towns scattered across the prairies there were few libraries and theaters, and the distribution of books, magazines, and newspapers in no way met the people's thirst for information or entertainment. Men, women, and children rode miles on horseback or drove over rough roads in wagons to see and hear a prominent lecturer. Susan was always a drawing card, for a woman on the lecture platform still was a novelty and almost everyone was curious about Susan B. Anthony. Many, to their surprise, discovered she was not the caricature they had been led to believe. She looked very ladylike and proper as she stood before them in her dark silk platform dress, a little too stern and serious perhaps, but frequently her face lighted up with a friendly smile. She spoke to them as equals and they could follow her reasoning. Her simple conversational manner was refreshing after the sonorous pretentious oratory of other lecturers.