We Don't Need No Stinkin' Law to Let Us Vote: The Susan B. Anthony Trial

The trial of Susan B. Anthony was peculiar from the start in that she was tried under a federal statute on an issue for which there was no federal standard. This was a twist her attorney tried ably, but unsuccessfully, to exploit. (Note: Because this blog displays in reverse chronological order, you might want to go to the first post in this series and start reading there.)

As noted in An Account of the Proceedings on the Trial of Susan B. Anthony, it was the states that determined the qualifications to vote, not the federal government. Consequentially, all the feds could do was to say "if you violated the mandates of your state, we--not they--will prosecute you." Never mind that what was legal in one state was not legal in another and this federal statute could not possibly be enforced consistently from state to state.

What was the federal government doing poking its nose into what presumably should have been purely a state matter? Recall that the year was 1872, just a few years after the Civil War. Those who had taken up arms against the federal government were disallowed from voting. The law invoked against Susan Anthony made it a crime to vote if you knew you were not permitted to do so.

So the crux of the charge would seem to be, did she vote knowing full well that she had no right to do so?

No big deal. Everyone knew women did not have the right to vote, right? Wrong. Very, very wrong. In fact, the argument made by the suffragettes was based--solidly--on the language in the U.S. Constitution. For the most part, the Constitution talks in terms of "the citizen" and "the people," with no specification that the citizen or person at issue was male or female, or black or white, for that matter. In just a few instances the words "he" or "his" or "him" are used but that was the common language of the law and was never otherwise construed to refer directly and solely to men.

For example, the fact that citizens were required to pay taxes did not exclude women, even though no legislation specifically included them in that obligation. Likewise, criminal laws applied equally to women, though that was never stated explicitly. In fact, the only instance where this male vocabulary was deemed to mean men and men only was in the business of voting and serving on juries.

Think about that for a minute and imagine the legal arguments that this could lead to. I'll delve into those in my next post.

Read Part 3