Benjamin F. Butler presented an able and exhaustive minority report which closed with the following declaration: "Therefore, because the fine has been imposed by a court of the United States for an offense triable by jury, without the same being submitted to the jury, and because the court assumed to itself the right to enter a verdict without submitting the case to the jury, and in order that the judgment of the House of Representatives, if it concur with the judgment of the committee, may, in the most signal and impressive form, mark its determination to sustain in its integrity the common law right of trial by jury, your committee recommend that the prayer of the petitioner be granted."
In June George F. Edmunds made an adverse report from the Senate Judiciary Committee in this remarkable language: "That they are not satisfied that the ruling of the judge was precisely as represented in the petition, and that if it were so, the Senate could not legally take any action in the premises, and they move that the committee be discharged from the further consideration of the petition, and that the bill be postponed indefinitely."
Senator Matthew II. Carpenter presented a long and carefully prepared minority report which concluded:
Unfortunately the United States has no "well-ordered system of jurisprudence." A citizen may be tried, condemned and put to death by the erroneous judgment of a single inferior judge, and no court can grant him relief or a new trial. If a citizen have a cause involving the title to his farm, if it exceed $2,000 in value, he may bring his cause to the Supreme Court; but if it involve his liberty or his life, he can not. While we permit this blemish to exist on our judicial system, it behooves us to watch carefully the judgments inferior courts may render; and it is doubly important that we should see to it that twelve jurors shall concur with the judge before a citizen shall be hanged, incarcerated or otherwise punished.
I concur with the majority of the committee that Congress can not grant the precise relief prayed for in the memorial; but I deem it to be the duty of Congress to declare its disapproval of the doctrine asserted and the course pursued in the trial of Miss Anthony; and all the more for the reason that no judicial court has jurisdiction to review the proceedings therein.
I need not disclaim all purpose to question the motives of the learned judge before whom this trial was conducted. The best of judges may commit the gravest of errors amid the hurry and confusion of a nisi prius term; and the wrong Miss Anthony has suffered ought to be charged to the vicious system which denies to those convicted of offenses against the laws of the United States a hearing before the court of last resort—a defect it is equally within the power and the duty of Congress speedily to remedy.
When Miss Anthony returned to Rochester in February, she found the inspectors were about to be put into jail because, acting under advice, they still refused to pay their fines. She wrote Benjamin F. Butler, who replied under date of February 22: "I would not, if I were they, pay, but allow process to be served; and I have no doubt the President will remit the fine if they are pressed too far." They were imprisoned February 26. Miss Anthony went at once to the jail and urged them not to pay the fine, for the sake of principle, promising to see that they were soon released. She waded through a heavy snow to consult her attorneys and then to the newspaper offices to talk with the editors in regard to the prisoners, reaching home at dark, and in her diary that night she writes, "I could not bear to come away and leave them one night in that dolorous place."
She went out for a few lectures in neighboring towns, and at the Dansville Sanitarium was presented by the patients with a purse of $62. Arriving in Rochester at 7 A. M., March 2, she went straight to the jail and breakfasted with the inspectors; then to see the marshal and succeeded in having them released on bail. She did not reach home till 1 p. M., and here she found this telegram from Senator Sargent: "I laid the case of the inspectors before the President today. He kindly orders their pardon. Papers are being prepared." Benjamin F. Butler also had interceded with the President and sent Miss Anthony a telegram of congratulation on the result. In a few days the inspectors were pardoned and their fines remitted by President Grant. They were in jail just one week and during that time received hundreds of calls, while each day bountiful meals were sent them by the women whose votes they had accepted. After their pardon a reception was given them at the home of Miss Anthony's sister, Mrs. Mosher, by the ladies of the Eighth ward, and in the spring they were re-elected by a handsome majority. Miss Anthony's fine stands against her to the present day.
This case was the dominating feature of the National Convention at Washington in the winter of 1874; the key-note of all the speeches and the arguments before the judiciary committees was woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. The women did not relinquish this claim until all ground for it was destroyed by a decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1875, in the case of Virginia L. Minor, of St. Louis. Francis Minor, a lawyer of that city, was the first to assert that women were enfranchised by both the letter and the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment, and, acting under his advice, his wife attempted to register for the presidential election of 1872. Her name was refused and she brought suit against the inspector for the purpose of making a test case. After an adverse decision by the lower courts, the case was carried to the Supreme Court of the United States and argued before that tribunal by Mr. Minor, at the October term, 1874. It is not too much to say that no constitutional lawyer in the country could have improved upon this argument in its array of authorities, its keen logic and its impressive plea for justice.1
The decision was adverse, the opinion of the court being delivered March 29, 1875, by Chief-Justice Waite, himself a strong advocate of the enfranchisement of women. The court admitted that "women are persons and citizens," but found that the "National Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens. The United States has no voters of its own creation. The National Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, but the franchise must be regulated by the States. The Fourteenth Amendment does not add to the privileges and immunities of a citizen; it simply furnishes an additional guarantee to protect those he already has. Before the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the States had the power to disfranchise on account of race or color. These amendments, ratified by the States, simply forbade that discrimination, but did not forbid that against sex."
This is in direct contradiction to the decision of Chief-Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case: "The words 'people of the United States' and 'citizens' are synonymous terms and mean the same thing; they describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty and hold the power, and conduct the government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the sovereign people, and every citizen is one of this people, and a constituent member of this sovereignty."
Although Miss Anthony and her co-workers still believed that, with a true interpretation, women were voters under these amendments, they were obliged to accept the decision of the highest court of appeal. They then returned to the work of petitioning Congress for a Sixteenth Amendment to the National Constitution which should prohibit disfranchisement on account of sex. They continued also the original plan of endeavoring to secure amendments to the constitutions of the different States abolishing the word "male" as a qualification for voting.2 Bitterly disappointed at the decision of the Supreme Court, it was nevertheless a source of pride to the women that they had made their claim for representation in the government, carried it to the highest tribunal and gone down in honorable defeat.
Miss Anthony never hesitated to ask the most distinguished men to speak on the woman suffrage platform, and Henry Wilson writes from the chamber of the Vice-President his regrets that he can not accept her invitation. Benjamin F. Butler replies: "As a rule I have refused to take part in any convention in the District of Columbia about any matter which might come before Congress. I have