Amendment, Fourteenth

Amendment to the US Constitution in 1868, during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War. It defines US citizenship by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the USA are US citizens, permitting former slaves and African-American people the same rights as other US citizens. It was designed to protect the rights of slaves freed under the Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 (see Amendment, Thirteenth.

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees that congressional representation will be reduced for any state found guilty of denying voting rights to male citizens. Other provisions include due process of law, such that every defendant regardless of race or class has the right to receive a fair hearing in court, and equal protection of the law, meaning that every US citizen of any class or race is subject to equal rights in terms of liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. It further disqualified Confederate soldiers from office and invalidated government responsibility for any war debts of the Confederate states.

The Fourteenth Amendment was originally ratified to protect freed slaves from being deprived of their rights by southern states and to overcome the effects of the Dred Scott Decision, which denied citizenship and restricted freedom. Southern states were required to ratify the amendment in order to be readmitted to the Union. As it repealed the former three-fifths rule (under which slave states got to increase their congressional representation by three-fifths of the number of slaves in their state), the stipulation for reducing representation where states were found guilty of denying African Americans the vote was designed to prevent the white South from instituting discriminatory rules and gaining power via increased representation. Moreover, it stated, for the first time, that African Americans were equal citizens, and made it illegal for states to abridge the fundamental rights of every citizen. In this respect the Fourteenth Amendment has had a great influence on the development of civil rights in the USA.

At the time, many southern states ignored the provision and introduced policies and requirements that effectively blocked African Americans from the vote. The amendment was not enforced and a further amendment was required, the Fifteenth Amendment, to grant voting rights to African-American citizens (see Amendment, Fifteenth).