14th Amendment Shorts

GLC Shorts: Reflections on the Fourteenth Amendment

Constitutional and reconstruction historians reflect on the most significant legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this series of GLC Shorts, each scholar on the panel presents their core argument regarding the meaning and lasting impacts of the amendment that granted citizenship to all U.S.-born persons.

 

1. David Blight: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment

David Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the GLC, introduces the panel and places the origins of the Fourteenth Amendment in the context of the “re-imagination of the U.S. Constitution” as necessitated by the Civil War and its aftermaths. Blight points out that “huge American dilemmas pass right through the story” of the passage of the three Reconstruction amendments.

2. Eric Foner: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment

Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, discusses the Fourteenth Amendment as “a series of compromises” through which new understandings of what it means to be a U.S. citizen were codified. Foner emphasizes that the project of post-Civil War Reconstruction was dynamic and inevitably incomplete.

3. Akhil Reed Amar: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment

Akhil Reed Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, clarifies distinctions between the Fifteenth Amendment, which focuses specifically on racial dimensions of voting rights, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants equality and citizenship to all U.S.-born persons. Amar points out that by guaranteeing fundamental rights and due process to all persons, the Fourteenth Amendment assures that even U.S. residents “who aren’t citizens also have Constitutional rights.”

4. John Fabian Witt: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment

John Witt, the Allen H. Duffy Class of 1960 Professor of Law at the Yale Law School, argues that the Fourteenth Amendment represents the end of the use of the just war tradition as a mechanism for abolishing slavery and establishing “justice on the ground in the Reconstruction of the South.” The Fourteenth Amendment, Witt points out, provides for non-military, constitutional means for continuing this process. These means are more limited than the wartime measures in some respects but also are open-ended and continually relevant within contemporary struggles for social justice.

5. Amy Dru Stanley: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment

Amy Dru Stanley, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, argues that significant outcomes of both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments include the support they provided for enacting the guarantees of the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Stanley discusses the “right to be an amusement seeker,” as stipulated in the 1874 Act, as a universalist “anti-slavery entitlement [that] transformed understandings of humanity itself.”

6. Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Origins and Legacies of the Fourteenth Amendment

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School and Co-Director of the Program in Law and History at Harvard. Brown-Nagin argues that the great promise and achievement of Reconstruction was the replacement of state power with Federal authority because of the burdens state power placed on newly emancipated people. Through the Fourteenth Amendment, this revolutionary shift in the nation’s political structure facilitated the ongoing process of addressing a range of inequalities concerning not just race but gender, disability, sexuality, and other categories of discrimination.