Susan B. Anthony Arrested for Voting in Presidential Election Tests 14th Amendment

On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony voted in the presidential election between Ulysses S. Grant and his opponent in Rochester, New York, along with 14 other women, in a deliberate act of civil disobedience designed to test whether the 14th Amendment granted women voting rights as citizens. Four days earlier, on November 1, Anthony had walked with her sisters Guelma, Hannah, and Mary to a voter registration office in a nearby barber shop and demanded registration. When election inspectors hesitated, Anthony quoted the 14th Amendment to justify her claim and threatened to sue them personally if they refused. The inspectors consulted prominent local lawyer John Van Voorhis, a strong women’s suffrage supporter, who advised them to register the women. On November 18, a deputy federal marshal confronted Anthony at her home to arrest her for the crime of voting. When asked to accompany him downtown, Anthony demanded to be “arrested properly” like a man, highlighting the discriminatory nature of her treatment.

Anthony’s trial on June 17, 1873, exposed how judicial institutions functioned to protect existing power structures against democratic challenges. The trial took place before a jury of 12 men and presiding judge Supreme Court Justice Ward Hunt, who heard federal circuit court cases as part of his duties. Anthony argued unsuccessfully that the 14th Amendment granted her voting rights as a citizen of the United States. In an extraordinary violation of due process, Judge Hunt instructed the jury to issue a guilty verdict without any deliberation, demonstrating how courts could abandon basic procedural fairness to enforce political exclusions. Anthony was convicted under section 19 of the Enforcement Act of 1870 for voting “without having a lawful right to vote” and sentenced to pay a $100 fine plus court costs. In response, Anthony told the judge, “I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty,” a promise she kept for the rest of her life.

The trial transformed women’s suffrage from one issue among many in the women’s rights movement into the central focus of activism for democratic expansion. The highly publicized proceedings raised public awareness about systematic exclusion of women from political participation and exposed how legal institutions defended that exclusion through procedural manipulation. The case demonstrated that courts would not extend constitutional protections to women through interpretation, requiring instead a specific constitutional amendment—a far more difficult path requiring approval from the same male-dominated legislatures that benefited from women’s exclusion. This judicial foreclosure of the 14th Amendment strategy revealed how institutional gatekeepers actively resisted democratic expansion, forcing reformers into multi-decade campaigns against entrenched interests. The trial’s injustice became a rallying point for the suffrage movement, though the right to vote would not be secured until 1920, nearly 50 years after Anthony cast her illegal ballot and 14 years after her death in 1906.