Fourteenth Amendment

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Fourteenth Amendment

Coming approximately ten years after the Dred Scott decision had ruled that all slaves and their descendants were not citizens of the United States, the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 28, 1868, granted both state and federal citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States" (with the notable exception of Native Americans living on reservations). It also pledged that no state shall "abridge the privileges or immunities" of citizens nor "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Along with the Fifteenth Amendment, which sought to extend the franchise to all blacks, the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted by Radical Republican members of Congress, who were uneasy with President Andrew Johnson's lenient policies toward the South in the wake of the Civil War. These Republicans aimed at giving meaning to the freedom that had been legally granted to slaves by the Thirteenth Amendment. In particular, they hoped to invalidate the discriminatory black codes that had been passed by various state legislatures.

Radical Republicans were also concerned that, with the emancipation of slaves, southern representation in Congress would dramatically increase when the former Confederate states reentered the Union—according to Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution, only three-fifths of the slave population had previously been counted for purposes of representation. To ensure that newly freed blacks would have a voice in choosing their political leaders, Section 2 of the amendment promised to reduce congressional representation proportionately for each male citizen denied suffrage. (Despite severe restrictions placed on black suffrage, however, this section was never applied.)

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment excluded former Confederates from holding political office even if they had previously taken an oath to support the U.S. Constitution. This section aimed at keeping former Confederate officers from regaining political office. It had only a temporary effect. Section 4 declared the government of the United States not liable for the Confederate debt.

The intentions of the Radical Republicans were undermined by a series of conservative Supreme Court decisions. In the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the Court held that state law, rather than federal law, controlled the basic civil liberties of citizens. Further, it interpreted the "privileges and immunities" of citizens in a narrow way, covering such matters as protection on the high seas. The Court also declared that states were not required to enforce the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights. In the 1883 Civil Rights cases, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not ensure citizens equal access to public accommodations, and in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), that racial segregation of railways was not a violation of the amendment's "equal protection" clause.

After World War II, a different interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment evolved from a less conservative Supreme Court. The "equal protection" clause began to be used to fight racial discrimination in such cases as Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), against school segregation, and the Reapportionment Cases (1964), against unfairly drawn state legislative districts. Additionally, the Court came to hold a broader interpretation of the civil rights protected under the Fourteenth Amendment. Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) outlawed racially restrictive covenants in housing. U.S. v. Guest (1966) applied the Fourteenth Amendment to cover private violence that was racially motivated. Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court ruled, in a series of cases, that most of the Bill of Rights had to be respected by the states. The liberal Court of the late 1960s and early 1970s found other rights guaranteed by the amendment, such as the right to use birth control devices (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965) and the right to an abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973). The appointees of several conservative Republican presidents from the 1970s and 1980s, however, have interpreted the rights protected under the amendment more narrowly.

It took approximately a century before the federal government was willing to enforce the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment as its authors had envisioned. The amendment will no doubt continue to be interpreted in ways that will either broaden or narrow federal protection of civil rights, according to the political climate of the nation and the makeup of the Court.