Courting Confrontation: The Arrest of Susan B. Anthony

Thursday, November 3, 2022 – Thursday, January 12, 2023
East Rotunda Gallery

On November 5, 1872, Susan B. Anthony and 14 other women attempted to vote in Rochester, New York, challenging section one of the 14th Amendment, which states, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Allowed by election officials to successfully register and cast their ballots in the 1872 election, they were later arrested and charged for “knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully vot[ing] for a representative to the Congress of the United States.”

The U.S. Marshals were directed to take Anthony to jail in December 1872—the only one of the group indicted and brought to trial. During the trial, Judge Ward Hunt instructed the jury to issue a guilty verdict without any deliberation. Anthony was found guilty and fined $100. She later petitioned Congress to review the trial and excuse her fine, believing that she had been denied her right to trial by jury because of the judge’s instructions.

Despite Anthony’s tireless advocacy for a woman suffrage amendment, she would not live to see it enshrined in the United States Constitution. It would take almost 50 more years of civil rights advocacy and confrontation before women would secure an amendment to the Constitution that prohibited states from denying the vote on the basis of sex. Fourteen years after Anthony’s 1906 death, passage of the 19th Amendment, widely known as the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, guaranteed “the right to vote shall not be denied on account of sex.”

Order to U.S. Marshal to Deliver Susan B. Anthony to County Jail, December 26, 1872

This order directed the U.S. Marshals to take Susan B. Anthony to jail on December 26, 1872. In U.S. v. Susan B. Anthony, she argued like many woman suffragists did, that the 14th Amendment gave her the right to vote as a citizen of the United States. Anthony lost her case and was found guilty and fined $100, which she never paid.

National Archives at New York City, Records of District Courts of the United States

Past Featured Records

Title IX
An Act of June 23, 1972, Public Law 92-318, 86 STAT 235, to Amend the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Vocational Educational Act of 1963, the General Education Provisions Act (Creating a National Foundation for Postsecondary Education and a National Institute of Education), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Public Law 874, Eighty-First Congress, and Related Acts, ...
Court-Martial record of Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin, March 10, 1778.
On March 10, 1778, Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin became the first U.S. soldier court-martialed for “attempting to commit sodomy” with another soldier. His sentence was to be literally drummed out of the Continental Army by its regiments’ fifes and drums. Enslin was told “never to return.” More than 230 years after Enslin’s court martial, gay men, lesbians, ...
Indictment for illegal voting, 1872
Susan B. Anthony devoted more than fifty years of her life to the cause of woman suffrage. After casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election in her hometown of Rochester, New York, she was arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted for voting illegally. At her two-day trial in June 1873, which she later described as "the greatest judicial outrage ...
Sylvia Mendez and the Struggle for Mexican American Civil Rights
Friday, September 13, 2024 - Wednesday, October 2, 2024East Rotunda Gallery Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez moved to Orange County, California, with their children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr., and Jerome in 1944. When they tried to enroll in the majority-white school near their home, they were instead sent to a segregated school for Hispanic students. The Mendez family filed a ...
A President Resigns – 50 Years Later
Thursday, August 1, 2024 - Thursday, September 12, 2024East Rotunda Gallery “I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first.” –Richard M. Nixon, August 8, 1974 During the night of June 17, 1972, five ...