The Fourteenth Amendment

First page of the 14th Amendment in the National Archives.

The Fourteenth Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted on July 9, 1868, was the second of three Reconstruction Amendments. The amendment provided the foundation for equal rights for all US citizens, including African-Americans, and a framework for their implementation in the former Confederate states.

The three main clauses of the amendment are the citizenship clause, the due process clause, and the equal protection clause. The Citizenship Clauseoverruled the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling that blacks could not be citizens of the United States. The Due Process Clause prohibits state and local governments from depriving persons of life, liberty, or property without certain steps being taken to ensure fairness. The Equal Protection Clause requires each state to provide equal protection under the law to all people within its jurisdiction. This clause was the basis for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision which led to the desegregation of United States schools.

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had previously granted U.S. citizenship to all persons born in the United States. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment added this principle to the Constitution for two reasons. (1) to prevent the Supreme Court from ruling the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to be unconstitutional for lack of congressional authority to enact such a law and (2) to prevent a future Congress from altering it by a mere majority vote. The amendment was also in response to the Black Codes that southern states had passed in the wake of the abolishment of slavery. These Black Codes attempted to return former slaves to something like their former condition by, among other things, restricting their movement, forcing them to enter into year-long labor contracts, prohibiting them from owning firearms, and by preventing them from suing or testifying in court.

The amendment consists of five sections (Figure 1):

1. Section 1 formally defines citizenship and protects a person's civil and political rights from abridgment or denial by any state. It overruled the Dred Scott decision that black people were not, and could not become, citizens of the United States.
2. Section 2 gave Southern states the choice of enfranchising Negro voters or losing Congressional representation.
3. Section 3 prohibited the election or appointment to any federal or state office of any person who had held any certain offices and then engaged in insurrection, rebellion, or treason. It was removed by Congress in 1898.
4. Section 4 confirmed the legitimacy of all United States public debt appropriated by the Congress. It also confirmed that neither the United States nor any state would pay for the loss of slaves or debts that had been incurred by the Confederacy.
5. Section 5 provided Congress with the authority to enforce the previous provisions.