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Your unjust penalty
November 4, 2024"I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty." — Susan B. Anthony ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ Hey look, a chance to support the newsletter!
Please let me know here if you can't see the ads. Thanks! ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ Unjust penaltyTomorrow is Election Day. One thing about writing a newsletter that tries to go back to dates in history and find stories supporting the idea that so as to prove that every single day is the anniversary of something really cool and optimism-inspiring, is that ahead of Election Day, you wind up with a lot of stories to choose from about Election Day. Most of them, as you might imagine, are about people who were elected to something. But since we like to zig when everyone else zags here, we're going to tell the story of someone who voted on Election Day. This might not seem like it was a big deal, since millions upon millions of people vote on Election Day every time we have one. But, this one reverberates many, many years later. Let's tell it this way: In 1820, a woman named Susan was born in Adams, Massachusetts, to a family with a strong belief in equality and social justice. Her father, a Quaker, raised her to understand that every person should be treated equally in the eyes of God and society. In her early adulthood, she worked as a teacher and was paid less than her male counterparts. This wasn't exactly an uncommon experience at the time, but it fueled her anger and determination. By the 1850s, she had joined the abolitionist movement and the fight for temperance. During the Civil War she led a drive to collect the most signatures on a petition to the government up until that time in history -- 400,000 names supporting abolition of slavery. Then, she shifted her focus to what she believed was a more urgent issue: women’s suffrage. You might have guessed by this point that we're talking about Susan B. Anthony. In 1851, she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the two formed a powerful partnership, traveling the country and speaking on the issue of women’s suffrage to anyone who would listen—and often to many who wouldn’t. They were met with jeers, threats, and resistance, yet they continued. Probably Anthony's most controversial political position to modern eyes and ears was that she actually campaigned against the 15th Amendment, which says that the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Her rationale was that she and Stanton wanted women to get similar protection at the same time, lest the country endorse an "oligarchy of sex, which makes the men of every household sovereigns, masters; the women subjects, slaves; carrying dissension, rebellion into every home of the Nation." Soon after she lost that battle, however, Anthony took on another -- also based on a post-Civil War amendment. Her National Women's Suffrage Association adopted a strategy of encouraging women to attempt to register and cast ballots, based on a reading of the 14th Amendment (which was only four years old at the time): "All people born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of the United States and their state of residence. No state can make laws that limit the rights of citizens, or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." About 50 women managed to register to vote; Anthony and 13 others in Rochester, N.Y. convinced election workers to allow them to vote on November 5, 1872 (152 years ago today). Anthony was actually surprised she was successful; she'd thought she would be turned away and thus have standing to challenge laws preventing women from voting. All 14 women were arrested, but to Anthony's disappointment the U.S. marshals who carried out the arrest refused to handcuff her, and then the judge who set her bail at $500 -- which she refused to post -- didn't enter an order holding her in jail. In fact, Anthony was the only woman who voted who was actually brought to trial. The outcome here seems bizarre by 21st-century standards, and part of this can only be explained by the fact that a lot of the protections we think of in criminal cases just didn't exist yet:
I know, right? Hunt sentenced Anthony to pay a $100 fine, which she refused. In yet another twist, Hunt refused to jail her for not paying it, because the law at the time meant she'd have no avenue to appeal if her sentence did not involve imprisonment. Anthony died in 1906. The 19th Amendment became part of the Constitution 14 years later: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." "To think I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel," Anthony apparently said to a friend on her deathbed. Starting in 2014, women began making the trek to Anthony's grave in Rochester to place "I Voted" stickers on her headstone after casting ballots; six years later the sheer number of people and stickers started to damage the marble marker, so it's now apparently covered by plexiglass. This story is all about Anthony, so she gets the quote of the day, and I love imagining her supposedly saying this directly to Hunt, after he announced her fine: "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty." We start as we end: Tomorrow is Election Day. Get out and vote if you haven't already!
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Bill Murphy Jr.
Hi. I write the Understandably daily newsletter—no algorithms, no outrage, just an essential daily newsletter trusted by 175,000+ smart people who want to understand the world, one day at a time. Plus bonus ebooks (aka 'Ubooks').
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