Seward certifies it: citizenship and equal protection enter the Constitution
On July 9, 1868, South Carolina became the 28th state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, reaching the necessary three-fourths threshold if the earlier rescissions by Ohio and New Jersey were invalid. Secretary of State William H. Seward certified this conditional adoption on July 20, 1868, but it was not until Georgia's ratification on July 27 that he officially proclaimed the amendment adopted the following day. The amendment granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States and guaranteed equal protection of the laws. The amendment overturned the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had denied citizenship to Americans descended from slaves. Confederate states had been required to ratify it just to regain seats in Congress.
The Fourteenth Amendment became the constitutional engine behind Brown v. Board of Education, Loving v. Virginia, and Obergefell v. Hodges, and its Section 3 resurfaced in 2024 in Trump v. Anderson. Its language has been cited in cases spanning more than 150 years, from Reconstruction to 2024.
QWhy did Andrew Johnson's own Reconstruction plan work against the amendment he opposed?
Johnson's lenient postwar policy let former Confederate states quickly re-form governments under leaders sympathetic to the old order, and those legislatures moved to reject the amendment outright rather than ratify it. Congress responded by overriding Johnson's approach entirely: it made ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a condition those states had to meet before their delegations would be readmitted to Congress. The president who vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 ended up watching his own reconstructed statehouses get forced into the very ratification vote he wanted blocked.
QWhat earlier English document supplied the language behind the amendment's due process clause?
The due process guarantee traces back centuries before the Constitution existed, to Clause 39 of the Magna Carta in 1215, which promised that no man would be seized or imprisoned except by lawful judgment of his equals or the law of the land. That thirteenth-century clause, carried forward through English common law, is one source scholars point to for the phrase John Bingham wrote into Section 1. A charter forced on an English king by rebellious nobles ended up shaping the constitutional rights of freed American slaves six and a half centuries later.
QWhat Supreme Court precedent from decades earlier gave the amendment's clauses their legal teeth in court?
Chief Justice John Marshall's 1803 opinion in Marbury v. Madison had already established that courts, not Congress or the president, held final say over what a constitutional provision meant, calling that power "the very essence of judicial duty." That principle of judicial review, decided over sixty years before the Fourteenth Amendment existed, gave the Supreme Court the authority to later interpret its clauses in cases far removed from Reconstruction. Marshall never lived to see the amendment; his ruling still decided how it would be read.
