Tennessee's House tied twice at 48 votes apiece on August 18, 1920, before 24-year-old Harry T. Burn switched sides and ratified the 19th Amendment by a single vote; the letter in his pocket was from his mother, telling him to be a good boy.

Harry T. Burn walked into the Tennessee House chamber on the morning of August 18, 1920, wearing a red rose, the badge opponents of woman suffrage had chosen for themselves that summer. He did not walk out wearing one.

Tennessee was the last state anyone needed. Thirty-five state legislatures had already ratified the federal amendment giving women the vote, one short of the three-fourths required to add it to the Constitution. Delaware had voted it down in June, and no other legislature was in session anywhere that could plausibly act before the November election. Governor Albert Roberts called Tennessee's lawmakers back to Nashville for a special session, and both sides of a seventy-two-year argument arrived to settle it in one room.

Why did it come down to one room in Nashville?

Suffragists had been organizing since the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, a fact both delegations in town knew by heart. Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, set up headquarters at the Hermitage Hotel. Anti-suffrage lobbyists, backed partly by liquor and textile interests uneasy about what enfranchised women might vote to regulate, checked into the same hotel's mezzanine.

Lawmakers picked a rose to declare where they stood: yellow for ratification, red against it. Newspapers called it the War of the Roses, and by the week of the vote nobody in the building needed to ask a colleague's position. A lapel already answered it.

How did the count end up tied twice at 48-48?

Speaker of the House Seth Walker (an attorney who had campaigned as a suffrage supporter before declaring himself against it once the special session opened) tried to kill the amendment before it reached a real vote. He moved to table the ratification resolution, a motion that needed only a simple majority to succeed.

It failed. Twice. Both times the House split 48 to 48, and a tie loses.

Burn, 24 years old and the youngest member of the General Assembly, had voted with Walker on both tabling motions. When the roll was finally called on ratification itself, he answered "aye." The tally came to 49 for and 47 against. Walker then switched his own vote to the winning side, a maneuver that let him legally move for reconsideration, and spent the rest of the week trying to undo the outcome. It held anyway.

What changed his mind?

In his coat pocket that morning was a seven-page letter from his mother, Febb Ensminger Burn, a widow who ran the family farm outside Niota. She had been reading the antis' newspaper attacks on suffrage and did not think much of them. "Hurrah and vote for suffrage," she wrote, "and don't keep them in doubt." Near the bottom of the last page: "Don't forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt put the 'rat' in ratification."

Burn later read the House a short statement explaining himself. He said he believed suffrage was a right, that he thought Tennessee had the legal standing to ratify, and that "a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow." He kept the letter the rest of his life.

Was August 18 really the day it became law?

Not exactly, and the gap is worth naming rather than smoothing over. Burn's vote gave the amendment its 36th ratifying state, which met the Constitution's threshold. But nothing required an immediate proclamation, and anti-suffragists in Tennessee were already threatening a lawsuit to stop certification before it happened.

So Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby signed the document alone, at his own house in Washington, at eight o'clock in the morning on August 26, with no ceremony and no reporters. That date is now Women's Equality Day. August 18 is when Tennessee decided the matter; August 26 is when the federal government made it official.

Who was still left out?

The amendment's operative line is short: the right to vote "shall not be denied or abridged... on account of sex." It says nothing about race, and Southern states kept the tools they had already built to keep Black voters from the polls. Poll taxes and literacy tests did not go anywhere in 1920. For most Black women in the South, the 19th Amendment was a right they could not safely exercise for another forty-five years, until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Chinese immigrant women could not naturalize and vote until 1943. Native American women needed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, and some states kept finding reasons to turn Native voters away for another two decades after that.

Susan B. Anthony, who had spent decades arguing this case in courtrooms and church basements, died in 1906. She missed the vote by fourteen years.

What Tennessee's vote still has to say

Every November, strangers leave "I Voted" stickers on Anthony's grave in Rochester by the thousands, which is its own answer to the question of who gets credit for finishing the work. The Hermitage Hotel still stands in Nashville. The roses are long gone from anyone's lapel.

Tennessee's vote did not permanently settle the question it looks like it settled: how many states an amendment actually needs, and by when. In 2020, a century after Burn switched sides, Virginia's legislature declared itself the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, decades after Congress's original deadline had expired. The National Archives and a federal court have been arguing since about whether a ratification that arrives that late still counts. Febb Burn could not have known she was drafting the opening argument for that fight. She was only telling her son what she thought was right, and trusting him to do it on the one day it mattered.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Suffrage in 60 Seconds: Harry Burn" and "Harry T. Burn"
• National Archives, "19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Women's Right to Vote (1920)" and "Pieces of History: The 19th Amendment at 100"
• Washington Post, "Tennessee mother Febb Burn's letter to son Harry T. Burn that ratified the 19th Amendment" (2020)
• Constitution Center, "The vote that led to the 19th Amendment" and "Why is August 26 known as Women's Equality Day?"
• HISTORY.com, "19th Amendment ratified thanks to one vote" and "The Mother Who Saved Suffrage"
• NPR, "Yes, Women Could Vote After the 19th Amendment — But Not All Women. Or Men" (2020)