Fourteenth Amendment

Fourteenth Amendment (1868), Congress's first attempt to settle the issues of the Civil War and restore the former Confederate states to the Union.The first of the amendment's five sections defined state and national citizenship, reversing the ruling in Scott v. Sandford that African Americans were not citizens of the United States. It also forbade states to deprive anyone of the rights of citizenship, infringe fundamental rights without due process of law, or deny equal protection of the laws. Other sections reduced the congressional representation of any state that denied voting rights to any class of men, disqualified many former government officials who had supported the Confederacy from holding public office, and guaranteed payment of debts incurred in suppressing the rebellion while barring payment of those incurred in support of it. Since the amendment appeared to sanction voting discrimination against women, some women's rights advocates opposed it. The fifth section authorized Congress to enforce the prior four.

Nearly all the states that had remained loyal to the Union quickly ratified the proposed amendment after Congress submitted it to the states for ratification in June 1866, but all the ex‐Confederate states except Tennessee refused. Congress then passed the Reconstruction Act, which pronounced existing governments in the South provisional until they adopted new constitutions and ratified the amendment. With this prodding, the amendment was ratified on 9 July 1868.

In the decades following, the Supreme Court defined the amendment narrowly in order to maintain a clear distinction between the powers of the federal and state governments. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Court distinguished the rights Americans held as state citizens from their rights as U.S. citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment, the Court held, guaranteed only the latter. In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Court held that Congress could enforce the amendment only against state actions and could not punish private citizens for violating civil rights. In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Court ruled that racial segregation did not deprive African Americans of equal protection of the law. Other decisions held that the amendment did not require the states to adhere to the protections written into the Bill of Rights.

While the Court narrowed the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of civil rights and civil liberties, it took an expansive view of the amendment's protection of property rights. From the 1880s to the later 1930s, in such cases as Lochner v. New York (1905), for example, the court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's due‐process clause protected corporations from governmental regulation of such matters as workers’ wages and working conditions and prices charged for goods and services. In the New Deal Era, when this laissez‐faire interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment hobbled governmental efforts to deal with the Great Depression, the Court reversed itself and ceased to overthrow economic regulation on constitutional grounds.

After World War II the Supreme Court began to use the equal‐protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to strike down state infringements of nonproperty civil rights and to sustain federal laws protecting such rights. Ruling that the Fourteenth Amendment “selectively incorporated” the most important provisions of the Bill of Rights, the court established a national body of rights that states cannot infringe. In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court rejected the Plessy decision, ruling that the equal‐protection clause forbade racial segregation. By expanding the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court after the 1930s became a major influence on public‐policy issues relating to civil liberties and civil rights.
See also Constitution; Depressions, Economic; Federalism; Reconstruction; States’ Rights; Woman Suffrage Movement.

Bibliography

Richard C. Cortner , The Supreme Court and the Second Bill of Rights, 1981.
William E. Nelson , The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine, 1988.

Michael Les Benedict