View source for Reconstruction - The 14th Amendment

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== The 15th Amendment ==
The 14th Amendment is one of the post-Civil War amendments, also known as the Reconstruction Amendments that was first intended to secure rights for former slaves. It includes the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses among others. It was proposed on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 28, 1868. It is perhaps the most significant structural change to the Constitution since the passage of the  Bill of Rights.
This Amendment provides a broad definition of national citizenship, and overturned the Dred Scott case, which excluded Blacks. It requires the states to provide equal protection under the law to all persons, not just to citizens, within their jurisdictions and was used in the mid-20th century to dismantle legal segregation, as in Brown v. Board of Education. The Due Process Clause has driven important and controversial cases regarding privacy rights, abortion, and other issues. from being American citizens

The first section of the 14th Amendment formally defines citizenship and requires the states to provide civil rights and it says: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This represented Congress's reversal of that portion of the decision that declared that Blacks were not and could not become citizens of the United States or enjoy any of the privileges and immunities of citizenship. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had already granted citizenship to all people born in the United States; the framers of the 14th Amendment enshrined this principle in the Constitution in order to stop the Supreme Court from ruling it unconstitutional for want of congressional authority to pass such a law, or from a future Congress altering people’s ability to be citizens by a bare majority vote.

The provisions in Section 1 have been interpreted to the effect that children born on United States soil, with very few exceptions, are U.S. citizens. This type of guarantee—legally termed jus soli, or "right of the territory"— does not exist in most of Europe or Asia, although it is part of English common law and is common in the Americas.

The 14th Amendment does not explicitly provide any procedure for loss of United States citizenship. Loss of U.S. citizenship is possible only under the following circumstances: Fraud in the naturalization process. Technically, however, this is not loss of citizenship, but rather a voiding of the purported naturalization and a declaration that the immigrant never was a U.S. citizen, or by voluntary relinquishment of citizenship. This may be accomplished either through renunciation procedures specially established by the State Department or through other actions which demonstrate an intention to give up U.S. citizenship.

For a long time, voluntary acquisition or exercise of a foreign citizenship was considered sufficient cause for revocation of U.S. citizenship. This concept was enshrined in a series of treaties between the United States and other countries. However, the Supreme Court overturned this concept in a 1967 case, Afroyim v. Rusk—as well as a 1980 case, Vance v. Terrazas—holding that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment barred Congress from exercising this sort of authority to revoke citizenship.

Congress also passed the 14th Amendment in response to the “Black codes” that Southern states had passed in the wake of the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States. These “codes” were laws that attempted to return freed slaves to something like their former condition by, among other things, restricting their movement and by preventing them from suing or testifying in court.

Prior to the adoption of this Amendment, the Bill of Rights was generally, though not universally, thought to act only as a restraint on federal governments, not those of the state, and a state's relations with its citizens and those of other states was legally restrained only by that state's constitution and laws and those provisions of the Constitution that limited the powers of the states. While many states modeled their constitutions and laws after the federal government’s, those state constitutions did not necessarily include provisions comparable to the Bill of Rights. There is good reason to believe that the framers and early supporters of the 14th Amendment believed that it would ensure that the states would be required to recognize the individual rights protected by the federal government. All of these rights were likely understood to fall within the "privileges or immunities" safeguarded by the Amendment. However, the Supreme Court sought to limit the reach of the Amendment by holding in the Slaughterhouse Cases of 1873 that the "privileges or immunities" clause was limited to "privileges or immunities" granted to citizens by the federal government in virtue of national citizenship. The Supreme Court further held in the civil rights cases that the Amendment was limited to "state action" and thus did not authorize Congress to outlaw racial discrimination on the part of private individuals or organizations. Neither of these decisions has been overturned and, in fact, has been specifically reaffirmed several times.

In the decades following the enactment of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court overturned laws barring Blacks from juries in Strauder v. West Virginia, or discriminating against Chinese-Americans in the regulation of laundry businesses in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, under the aegis of the Equal Protection Clause. In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court held that the states could impose segregation so long as they provided equivalent facilities. This was the genesis of the "separate but equal" doctrine. The popular understanding of what was encompassed under "civil rights" was much more restricted during the time of the 14th Amendment's ratification than the present understanding it involved such things as equal treatment in criminal and civil court, in sentencing and in availability of civil services if they apply. On this scheme, political rights were first guaranteed not with the 14th Amendment, but with the 15th Amendment and its giving everyone the right to vote. Social rights first explicitly appeared with Loving v. Virginia in 1967, which declared anti-miscegenation laws to be unconstitutional., or laws against interracial marriages,
Many maintain that the 14th Amendment was designed to encompass a broad anti-discrimination principle, or at least to declare personal rights broader than the restricted concept of "civil rights." On this view, Plessy v. Ferguson sapped the Equal Protection Clause of its original meaning by restricting its application to this degree. The Supreme Court went even further in restricting civil rights in Berea College v. Kentucky holding that the states could force private actors to discriminate by prohibiting an integrated college from admitting both Black and White students. By the early 20th century, the Equal Protection Clause had been eclipsed to the point that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dismissed it as "the usual last resort of constitutional arguments."

The Supreme Court held to the "separate but equal" doctrine for more than 50 years, despite numerous cases in which the Court itself had found that the segregated facilities provided by the states were almost never equal. This held until the case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The Brown decision was met with a campaign of resistance from White Southerners, and for decades the federal courts attempted to enforce Brown's mandate against continual attempts of circumvention. This resulted in the controversial forced busing decrees handed down by federal courts in many parts of the nation, including major Northern cities such as Detroit and Boston.

In the half century since Brown, the Supreme Court has extended the reach of the Equal Protection Clause to other historically disadvantaged groups, such as women, aliens and illegitimate children, although it has applied a somewhat less stringent test than applied to governmental discrimination on the basis of race. Beginning in the 1880s, the Supreme Court interpreted the 14th Amendment's Due Process Clause as providing substantive protection to private contracts and thus prohibiting a range of social and economic regulation. The Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment protected "freedom of contract," or the right of employees and employers to bargain for wages without great interference from the state.
Yet while the Supreme Court has emphatically rejected the substantive due processprecedents that allowed it to overturn states' economic regulations, in the past 40 years, it has recognized a number of "fundamental rights" of individuals, such as privacy and some parental rights, which the states can regulate only under narrowly defined circumstances. In effect, it has found an alternative mechanism for fulfilling many of the intentions the Amendment's framers and ratifiers expressed in the Privileges or Immunities Clause, though without acknowledging the inconsistency of earlier decisions with that clause or opting for the full Incorporation of all relevant federal rights against the states in the manner the Amendment seems designed to require.

While it has not been fully implemented, the doctrine of Incorporation has thus been used to ensure, through the unwieldy and unexpected means of the Due Process Clause instead of the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the application of nearly all of the rights explicitly enumerated in the Bill of Rights to the states. As a result, the 14th Amendment not only empowered the federal courts to intervene in this area to enforce the guarantee of due process and the equal protection of the laws, but to import the substantive rights of free speech, freedom of religion, protection from unreasonable searches and cruel and unusual punishment and other limitations on governmental power. At the present, the Supreme Court has held that the Due Process Clause incorporates all of the substantive protections of the First, Fourth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments and all of the Fifth Amendment, other than the requirement that any criminal prosecution must follow a grand juryindictment, but none of the provisions of the Seventh Amendment relating to civil trials. Thus, the Supreme Court has also greatly expanded the reach of procedural due process requiring some sort of hearing before the government may terminate civil service employees, expel a student from public school or cut off a welfare recipient's benefits.
The Congress proposed the 14th Amendment on June 13, 1866. There being 37 states in the Union at that time, the ratification of 28 would bring this Amendment into operation.

'''By July 9, 1868, 28 states had ratified the Amendment:'''

'''The dates of ratification were:'''
<center>
{| class="wikitable sortable" align=center
|- align=center
|Connecticut<br>(June 25, 1866) ||Ohio<br> (January 4, 1867) ||Minnesota<br> (January 16, 1867) ||Wisconsin<br> (February 7, 1867) ||Florida<br> (June 9, 1868) 
|- align=center
|New Hampshire (July 6, 1866) ||New York<br> (January 10, 1867) ||Maine<br> (January 19, 1867) ||Pennsylvania<br> (February 12, 1867) ||North Carolina<br>(July 4, 1868, after having rejected it on December 14, 1866)
|- align=center
|Tennessee<br> (July 19, 1866) ||Kansas<br> (January 11, 1867) ||Nevada<br> (January 22, 1867) ||Massachusetts<br> (March 20, 1867) ||Louisiana <br>(July 9, 1868, after having rejected it on February 6, 1867)  
|- align=center
|New Jersey<br> (September 11, 1866) ||Illinois<br> (January 15, 1867) ||Indiana<br> (January 23, 1867) ||Nebraska<br> (June 15, 1867) ||South Carolina<br> (July 9, 1868, after having rejected it on December 20, 1866)  
|- align=center
|Oregon<br> (September 19, 1866) ||West Virginia<br> (January 16, 1867) ||Missouri<br> (January 25, 1867) ||Iowa<br> (March 16, 1868)   
|- align=center
|Vermont<br> (October 30, 1866) ||Michigan<br> (January 16, 1867) ||Rhode Island<br> (February 7, 1867) ||Arkansas<br> (April 6, 1868) 
|}</center>

However, Ohio passed a resolution that purported to withdraw their ratification on January 15, 1868. The New Jersey legislature also tried to rescind their ratification on February 20, 1868. New Jersey’s governor had vetoed its withdrawal on March 5, and the legislature overrode the veto on March 24. Accordingly, on July 20, 1868, Secretary of State William H. Seward certified that the amendment had become part of the Constitution if the rescissions were ineffective. Congress responded on the following day, declaring that the amendment was part of the Constitution and ordering Seward to promulgate the Amendment.

'''Meanwhile, two additional states had ratified the amendment:'''

Alabama (July 13, 1868, the date the ratification was "approved" by the governor)
Georgia (July 21, 1868, after having rejected it on November 9, 1866)
Thus, on July 28, Seward was able to certify unconditionally that the 14th Amendment was part of the Constitution without having to endorse Congress's assertion that the withdrawals were ineffective.

=== Ratification Controversy ===

A number of individuals argue that the ratification of the 14th Amendment violated Article V of the Constitution. For instance, some argue that: First, the 14th Amendment was proposed by a rump Congress that did not include representatives and senators from most ex-Confederate states, and, had those congressmen been present, the Amendment would never have passed. Second, ex-Confederate states were counted for Article V purposes of ratification, but were not counted for Article I purposes of representation in Congress, and finally, the ratifications of the ex-Confederate states were not truly free, but were coerced. For instance, many ex-Confederate states had their re-admittance to the Union conditioned on ratifying the 14th Amendment.




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'''Ratification was completed on December 6, 1865. The amendment was subsequently ratified by the following states:'''
<center>
{| class="wikitable sortable" align=center
|- align=center
| Oregon <BR>(December 8, 1865) || Iowa <BR>(January 15, 1866) || Delaware <BR>(February 12, 1901, after having rejected it on February 8, 1865)
|- align=center
| California <BR>(December 19, 1865) || New Jersey <BR>(January 23, 1866, after having rejected it on March 16, 1865) || Kentucky <BR>(March 18, 1976, after having rejected it on February 24, 1865)
|- align=center
| Florida <BR>(December 28, 1865, reaffirmed on June 9, 1869) || Texas <BR>(February 18, 1870) || Mississippi <BR>(March 16, 1995, after having rejected it on December 5, 1865)
|}
</center>
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