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Fourteenth Amendment
4 articles on Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2081 Includes: BibliographySince its ratification in 1868 as one of the three Reconstruction amendments, the Fourteenth Amendment has been the subject of more litigation than any other amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, constitutional scholars have identified its section 1 as a “second constitution” because it changed the focus of the original Constitution in compelling states to guarantee individual rights to American citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed in the wake of President Andrew Johnson's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which attempted to guarantee citizenship rights for former slaves. When introducing the amendment, the Michigan senator Jacob Merritt Howard maintained that its intention was the abolition of all class legislation in the various states. The members of the Reconstruction Congress believed ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 919Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified on July 28, 1868, that was intended to guarantee the civil rights of African Americans. During the Civil War the Thirteenth Amendment freed Southern slaves, but after the war most blacks in the segregated South were able to realize little of their new freedom. President Andrew Johnson, who wanted to accommodate the defeated Confederate states, was reluctant to press the South for black equality. As a result, radical Republicans in Congress drafted and secured passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Their intent was partly to guarantee black freedom as granted by the Thirteenth Amendment, and partly to limit the power of the reconstructed South.The Fourteenth Amendment contains five sections, the heart of which is Section one (discussed below). Section two guarantees that if black men ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 715(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 Americanswere 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 ...
Read full articleFourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1868)
Word Count: 788The Fourteenth Amendment was the second “Reconstruction Amendment” passed after the Civil War. An endowment of citizenship rights to African Americans, it was passed by Congress on 13 June 1866 and was ratified by twenty-eight of the thirty-seven states by 9 July 1868. The amendment was necessary because the 1857 Dred Scottdecision had established the precedent that African Americans could not be American citizens. In addition the clause insuring due process and equal protection was necessary because state governments in the South were passing “Black Codes” to curtail freepeople's rights. Unfortunately the Fourteenth Amendment did not succeed in guaranteeing the rights of citizenship to African Americans until the mid-twentieth century, when it was used as the backbone of many major civil rights cases including ...
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