The Fourteenth Amendment

The First Amendment is probably the best known and most widely quoted part of the Constitution. While the Fourteenth Amendment is comparatively obscure, it is, in many ways, even more important than the First Amendment in the history of rights and liberties in the United States of America. To understand its importance, however, it is necessary to turn back the clock to the mid-1800's, before the Civil War.

As the nation grew during the first half of the nineteenth century and new territories and states were formed, the stage was being set for a showdown between “slave states” and states that had outlawed slavery. A host of problems were being played out on an almost daily basis as states struggled with questions about how to treat former slaves and their children. And what of slaves who were moved by their owners from a state where slavery was legal to one where it was not? In just such an instance, the Supreme Court reviewed the case of Dred Scott, a slave who had been moved from Missouri to Illinois and back by his master. Scott argued that his transfer to a state where slavery was illegal (Illinois) had made him a free man.

In one of its most criticized decisions, the Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that black people who had come to America as slaves were not citizens and, therefore, could not expect any protections from the national government. It would take a bloody civil war and an amendment to the Constitution (the Fourteenth) to reverse the Court’s decision.

After the South had been defeated by the North in the Civil War, legally sanctioned slavery came to an end in the re-United States of America. In the “Emancipation Proclamation,” Abraham Lincoln declared:

I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are, and henceforward shall be, free . . . And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.