14th Amendment Ratified: Equal Protection for All

Former slaves became citizens of the United States on July 28, 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was declared ratified, overturning the Supreme Court's infamous ruling that Black Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." No other amendment has done more to shape American law. The amendment emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War and the political battles of Reconstruction. After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, Southern states passed Black Codes that effectively re-enslaved freed people through vagrancy laws, labor contracts, and restrictions on movement. Radical Republicans in Congress, led by Thaddeus Stevens and John Bingham, drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to constitutionalize the protections of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and place them beyond the reach of future hostile Congresses. The amendment's first section packed four revolutionary clauses into eighty-one words. The Citizenship Clause overturned Dred Scott by declaring all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens. The Privileges or Immunities Clause was intended to protect fundamental rights, though the Supreme Court gutted it within five years. The Due Process Clause prohibited states from depriving any person of life, liberty, or property without legal process. The Equal Protection Clause required every state to treat people within its borders equally under law. Ratification was coerced. Congress required former Confederate states to ratify the amendment as a condition of regaining representation. Southern legislatures initially rejected it, then ratified under military pressure. Secretary of State William Seward's certification on July 28, 1868, came amid genuine legal uncertainty about whether the ratifications were valid. The amendment lay dormant for decades as the Supreme Court hollowed out its protections and Jim Crow segregation flourished. Only in the twentieth century did the Fourteenth Amendment become the constitutional engine its framers intended, anchoring Brown v. Board of Education, the incorporation of the Bill of Rights against the states, and nearly every major civil rights decision since.