History of the United States I / Unit 16 USH1 2271 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Fourteenth Amendment
The idea
Because Dred Scott raised constitutional doubts about the Civil Rights Act, the Radicals wrote its provisions into an amendment and sent it to the states in July. Section one holds that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. It forbids any state to abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Those clauses overturn Dred Scott directly. The amendment also eliminates the three-fifths compromise, reduces representation for states denying adult male suffrage, bars from office anyone who engaged in insurrection or rebellion unless pardoned by two-thirds of Congress, and voids all Confederate war debts and all claims for the loss or emancipation of any slave.
In practice
Birthright citizenship entering the Constitution as the direct answer to Taney, nine years after he wrote that a Black person could never be a citizen of the United States.
Where people slip
This is the course's largest constitutional entry after Dred Scott, and the two belong together. One decision held that Black Americans could not be citizens; one amendment was written specifically to erase it, and it erased it by defining citizenship in a way no court could narrow, namely by birth. Note the debt clause as well, because it does something people miss. Voiding claims for the loss or emancipation of any slave means no former owner could ever be compensated for the people they had held, and it put that beyond the reach of any later Congress. Every former Confederate state except Tennessee refused to ratify in eighteen sixty-six, and refusing is what brought the army back.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States I