On the lecture platform Susan wore a gray silk dress with a soft, white lace collar. Her hair, now graying, was smoothed back and twisted neatly into a tight knot. Everything about her indicated refinement and sincerity, and most of her audiences felt this.
"Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and vote in making and executing the laws," she declared as she looked into the faces of the men and women who had gathered to hear her, farmers, storekeepers, lawyers, and housewives, rich and poor, a cross section of America.
Repeating to them salient passages from the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, she added, "It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens: but we the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men."[298]
She asked, "Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I think the disfranchised ex-rebels, and the ex-state prisoners will agree with me that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all the others are nothing."[299]
Quoting for them the Fifteenth Amendment, she told them it had settled forever the question of the citizen's right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment, she reasoned, applies to women, first because women are citizens and secondly because of their "previous condition of servitude." Defining a slave as a person robbed of the proceeds of his labor and subject to the will of another, she showed how state laws relating to married women had placed them in the position of slaves.
As she analyzed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and cited authorities for her conclusions, she left little doubt in the minds of those who heard her that women were persons and citizens whose privileges and immunities could not be abridged.
On this note she concluded: "We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of 'guilty' against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections ... We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that 'the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human rights unconstitutional.' And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot—all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law."
Speaking twenty-one nights in succession was arduous. "So few see or feel any special importance in the impending trial," she jotted down in her diary. In towns, such as Geneva, where she had old friends, like Elizabeth Smith Miller, she was assured of a friendly welcome and a good audience.[300]