Susan Anthony: Guilty of Unlawfully Voting

Susan spent the rest of her life fighting for women's suffrage. She coordinated the effort from her house in Rochester. Every year she went to Congress to plead for a constitutional amendment that would officially give women what the 14th Amendment implicitly grants. Every year her efforts were in vain. Too many people thought they had too much to lose were women given equal rights.

Before she died at age 86, Ms. Anthony gave a final speech where she said the oft-quoted words:

Failure is impossible.

Perhaps not "impossible," but it took nearly one hundred years after her trial before the U.S. Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to overturn a gender-based law.

Susan B. Anthony and her colleague, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, did not live long enough to see the 19th Amendment passed. Finally, in 1920, that Amendment gave women the right to vote.

Ward Hunt continued as an associate Justice of the Supreme Court until Congress passed a special law giving him the right to an early pension. He resigned the day the special bill passed. The Supreme Court justice who sat as a trial judge and tossed out all elements of due process is remembered today as a justice who didn't really contribute much to the work of the high court. Susan Anthony, who died March 13, 1906, is remembered as one of the true fighting patriots of American justice.