Earlier in this space we’ve looked at two notable legal cases involving Canandaigua. The execution of 19 year-old Canandaigua native Midshipman Philip Spencer energized the drive to create our Naval Academy in Annapolis. The attempt in 1800 to indict Penn Yan prophetess Jemima Wilkinson for blasphemy was part of the hurly-burly of frontier life.
An 1873 trial, though, was far more significant. Curiously, this concerned a “crime” that took place in the Eighth Ward of Rochester, where Susan B. Anthony had registered to vote. So had some 50 other women, all of whom arrived at their various polling places on election day demanding to exercise their franchise. Fifteen were admitted citywide, prompting rapid action by U.S. Marshals, who arrested Anthony at her Madison Street home less than two weeks later. She dramatically extended her wrists to be handcuffed (they declined), then told the streetcar conductor he could get the price of her ticket from her captors, since this was their ride, not hers. You can see the room in which the arrest took place by visiting the house, now open to the public.
All fifteen women, and the male election officials who admitted them, were arrested, but all the other cases were held in abeyance until Anthony was tried. For two decades she had been the best-known face and voice of the women’s suffrage movement, besides her ardent campaigning for abolition, civil rights, and other reforms. We know that she had spoken in Bath on January 5, 1855, then in Corning on the seventh and ninth. She also did meetings in Cohocton and Caton on dates of which we’re not certain.
Out on bail after her 1872 arrest, she undertook a speaking tour of every town and village in Monroe County. This scared prosecutors so much that they moved the trial to Canandaigua; she then barnstormed every village in Ontario County. In either venue, they were going to get a jury that had had ample opportunity to hear her opinions on the matter.
The trial took place in the gold-domed courthouse that still presides over upper Main Street. After two days of testimony the judge ordered the jury to give a directed verdict of guilty. Given a chance to speak on day three, Anthony took over the courtroom, pacing the room, blasting the judge’s conduct and passionately setting forth the case for women’s suffrage, even as the judge vainly tried to regain control by getting her to sit down and shut up. When she finally paused long enough for him to fine her a hundred dollars she snapped, “I shall never pay one dollar of your unjust penalty.” And she didn’t, either.
What she DID do was deeply burn the struggle into the minds of the public. For 60 years she embodied the fight for votes, and though women voted in a number of states by the time she died in 1906, she wasn’t one of them. New York wouldn’t get full suffrage until 1918 (two years ahead of the national amendment). So except for some technical exceptions (since she owned a house, she could vote on property tax issues beginning in 1901), I suppose that that presidential ballot of 1872 was the only one she ever cast. She might have voted for Horace Greeley or Ulysses Grant, or for the Labor Reform Party (she was also a union organizer… I guess in her spare time). But the People’ Party had nominated Victoria Woodhull for president and Anthony’s old comrade Frederick Douglass as vice-president, raising the banner at once for African Americans and woman Americans, both of whom struggled under crushing weights of oppression and prejudice. If you only had one vote in your entire long lifetime (86 years), I imagine that one would be pretty satisfying.