This article traces the chronological development of the Fourteenth Amendment, from its roots in the aftermath of the American Civil War through its drafting, congressional passage, and state ratification. For competing interpretations of its meaning and purpose, see fourteenth-amendment-viewpoint. For background on the broader package of postwar amendments, see Reconstruction Amendments History.
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery but left open the legal status of nearly four million newly freed people. Southern state legislatures responded with Black Codes restricting the movement, labor contracts, and legal standing of African Americans. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to attack these discriminatory codes, guaranteeing equal benefits and access to the law for the freedmen.
President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill on March 27, 1866, framing the expansion of citizenship to African Americans as a form of discrimination against the eleven southern states left without congressional representation, and noting that “large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners” were made to wait for naturalization while freedmen would receive citizenship immediately. Congress overrode the veto three weeks later. Doubts about Congress's constitutional authority to enact and enforce the statute - particularly if Southern Democrats regained seats - prompted efforts to enshrine its protections in a constitutional amendment. For Johnson's broader conflict with Congress over Reconstruction, see andrew-johnson-reconstruction-history.
More than seventy separate proposals for an amendment were drafted and considered. In late 1865, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction proposed an amendment that would have apportioned congressional representation according only to a state's enfranchised citizens. The proposal passed the House but was blocked in the Senate by a coalition of Radical Republicans led by Charles Sumner, who called it a “compromise with wrong,” joined by Democrats opposed to expanding rights for black Americans.
Attention then turned to a proposal from Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio, which would have empowered Congress to secure “equal protection of life, liberty, and property” for all citizens; this version failed in the House. In April 1866 the Joint Committee combined the earlier proposals into a third version, repudiating Confederate debt and addressing voting rights. Robert Dale Owen is credited with the decision to merge the separate proposals into a single, lengthy amendment, on the reasoning that its more popular provisions would carry the less popular ones to ratification.
In early 1866 the Joint Committee on Reconstruction had submitted several distinct proposals, each addressing a single problem; these were bundled into one amendment, and a Citizenship Clause was added at a late stage. Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, introducing the amendment on the Senate floor, stated that the Privileges or Immunities Clause would extend to the states “the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments” of the Bill of Rights, an intention historians describe Bingham as having shared in drafting Section One. Historians disagree on how widely this view of incorporation was shared in Congress at the time, or among the public. See fourteenth-amendment-incorporation-doctrine-debate.
The House debated the joint resolution, H.J. Res. 127, on April 28, April 30, May 7, May 8, and May 9, 1866, and passed it on May 10 by a vote of 128 to 37, with 19 not voting. The Senate took up debate on May 23 and May 24. The Senate amended Sections 2, 3, and 4 of the resolution and passed the revised text on June 8, 1866, by a vote of 33 to 11, with five not voting. The House agreed to the Senate's amendments on June 13, 1866, by a vote of 138 to 36, with ten not voting.
On June 16, 1866, Secretary of State William H. Seward transmitted the amendment to the state governors, while President Johnson sent Congress a message stating that his transmittal of the proposal should be considered purely ministerial and not an endorsement of the amendment.
Every formerly Confederate state legislature except Tennessee's initially refused to ratify the amendment. Any state that ratified the amendment would be automatically readmitted to representation in Congress, yet the former Confederate states refused to do so in 1866. Republican and Democratic candidates both made the proposed amendment central to the 1866 midterm campaigns, with Johnson siding with the Democrats; Republicans won landslide majorities in both chambers, securing the votes needed for ratification to proceed.
With its strengthened majority, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, directing the army to supervise the formation of new state governments in the South elected with the participation of black voters; these new governments then held a second round of voting on the amendment. Congress had conditioned a state's readmission on its ratification of the amendment.
Connecticut ratified on June 30, 1866, followed over the next two years by most of the other states still in the Union, with Tennessee ratifying July 9, 1866, New York on January 10, 1867, and Pennsylvania on February 12, 1867, among others. New Jersey and Oregon both ratified in September 1866 but later attempted to rescind their ratifications after Democrats regained control of their legislatures. Ohio's legislature likewise withdrew its earlier assent on January 15, 1868, having ratified on January 11, 1867.
On July 20, 1868, Secretary of State Seward certified that, if the rescissions by Ohio and New Jersey were legally ineffective, the amendment had become part of the Constitution upon South Carolina's ratification as the twenty-eighth state. The following day, Congress passed a resolution declaring New Jersey's attempted rescission “scandalous” and affirming the amendment's adoption. On July 28, 1868, the amendment was declared ratified by the necessary twenty-eight of thirty-seven states in a certificate issued by the Secretary of State, becoming part of the supreme law of the land.
The amendment was rejected outright, and not later ratified within the period, by Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware among the states then in the Union; Kentucky did not ratify until 1976.
During Reconstruction, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as enforcement legislation under the amendment, barring racial discrimination in public accommodations and jury service. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, the Supreme Court held the 1875 act unconstitutional, reasoning that the Fourteenth Amendment restrained state action rather than the conduct of private individuals such as hotel and restaurant owners, and that Congress lacked power to regulate purely private conduct under it. See civil-rights-act-1964-state-action-doctrine-debate and Civil Rights Act of 1964 - Liberal Constitutional Viewpoint for how this state-action question resurfaced nearly a century later.
With the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the Supreme Court's “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, federal enforcement of the amendment's protections for African Americans in the South receded. Black and white citizens continued to petition, litigate, and dissent throughout this period, laying arguments that would later be revived in the twentieth century.
The amendment's equal protection clause first received sustained judicial attention in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Decades later the Supreme Court overturned Plessy, holding in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional under the amendment. In Adamson v. California (1947), Justice Hugo Black's dissent compiled an extensive appendix of statements by the amendment's framers, advocates, and ratifiers regarding its original intent, reviving scholarly attention to the 1866 debates. In Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the Court held that the amendment's historical context of countering the Black Codes informed its proper interpretation.
The amendment's Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses subsequently formed the constitutional basis for a range of twentieth-century rulings, including Loving v. Virginia (1967) on interracial marriage and Roe v. Wade (1973) on abortion. See fourteenth-amendment-substantive-due-process-controversy and roe-v-wade-history.