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November 28, 2005
Illegal Voting
On November 28, 1872, a U.S. deputy marshall came to Susan B. Anthony's door and arrested her. The crime: on November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast her vote in the Presidential Elections. The charge: Illegal voting.
The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868, had declared that all people born in the United States were citizens and that no legal privileges could be denied to any citizen. Anthony decided to challenge this amendment. Saying that women were citizens and the amendment did not restrict the privilege of voting to men, she registered to vote in Rochester, New York, on November 1, 1872. Four days later, she and fifteen other women voted in the presidential election. All sixteen women were arrested, but only Anthony was brought before a court.
Her trial, United States v. Susan B. Anthony, began on June 17, 1873. The presiding judge opposed women's suffrage and wrote his decision before the trial even had started. Refusing to let Anthony testify, he ordered the jury to find her guilty, then sentenced her to pay a $100 fine. She refused to pay "a dollar of your unjust penalty," and no further action was taken against her.
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 Nineteenth Amendment fourteen years after her death in 1906.
Posted by LindaSoG at November 28, 2005 06:05 AM
Comments
Democracy doesn't happen overnight and it is not our God given right.
Many good people (like Anthony) had to fight very hard for it.
In fact we still have to.
Posted by: Felis at November 28, 2005 08:23 PM
Felis, I get so mad at people when they don't vote, that's one of the reasons why I posted this.
A reminder of how precious our rights are and how hard some brave people fought for them.
We take so much for granted.
Posted by: LindaSoG at November 29, 2005 07:43 AM