The 14th Amendment

The 14th Amendment, passed in 1868, was a reconstruction amendment used to describe citizenship and the rights of those said citizens. It also protects against the disenfranchisement of those said citizens. During the Gilded Age, I learned from my AP US teacher, that some large trusts and monopolies used this to protect themselves.

What if the 14th Amendment wasnt passed?
 
Misery. The 14th Amendment really contains the most important rights that any American citizen has, despite its unfortunate hijacking during the Gilded Age (through the present day) to protect corporate interests. Let's review:

  1. 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. The short-term impact is that the slaves were not just free, but also citizens. The longer-term impact was the pre-WWI rush of immigration, one of the greatest movements of people that the world has ever seen, because everyone, even despised groups like Italians and Chinese, knew that their children would become US citizens.
  2. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Up until this point, the Bill of Rights did not apply to state governments. Think about that!
  3. Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Huge, huge. This is the part that gets corrupted into "freedom of contract." But it's much bigger. It emphasizes that everyone gets their day in court to enforce any of their rights, and the judge must be neutral. Even the absolute minimal interpretation (espoused by Clarence Thomas) requires the Rule of Law, which until this point was more custom than explicit. But this is also the (in)famous source of the Right to Privacy, which ensures that the government can't get involved in things where it doesn't have a compelling state interest. This, basically, is why the government can't tell a family what they can do in the privacy of their own home.
  4. Nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. What a wonderful phrase. If this had been interpreted the way that the Radical Republicans in the 1860s intended, then the 1960s Civil Rights Acts would have hardly been necessary. As it is, it took a century, but now the idea of equal opportunity is a bedrock principle that even the most conservative politicians cite to frequently.
  5. ...when the right to vote...is denied to any of the male inhabitants...the basis of representation therein shall be reduced... Freaking brilliant. If ex-Confederate states disenfranchised blacks (or anyone else), then they'd lose seats in Congress. Of course, there was a little bit of a courage problem that stopped the rest of the nation from enforcing this one, but the principle is correct.
  6. No person shall ... hold any office ... who, having previously taken an oath ... to support the Constitution ... shall have engaged in insurrection ... But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. Also brilliant. Confederates had to either choose new government leaders, or else face the humiliation of getting Congress's approval for each one. This one actually got enforced, too.
  7. The validity of the public debt of the United States...shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave...You're G--d---- right we're not paying you for the "loss" of your slaves. You lose a war, you face the consequences. But the first sentence is important, too. It saved the USA from a major financial panic -- we weren't used to trusting Government bonds. And it actually has effects to this day -- in 1935 the Supreme Court ruled that Congress can't void a US government bond. That's why US bonds are considered risk-free: even if Congress did something dumb like refuse to authorize the debt ceiling or the budget, bond payments wouldn't skip a beat.
 
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No person shall ... hold any office ... who, having previously taken an oath ... to support the Constitution ... shall have engaged in insurrection ... But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability. Also brilliant. Confederates had to either choose new government leaders, or else face the humiliation of getting Congress's approval for each one. This one actually got enforced, too.

Not for very long, as I understand it. The 14A took effect in 1868, and iirc almost all those disablities were removed by Congress in 1872.
 
Privileges or immunities is actually rather meaningless. The court didn't really know what it meant and essentially said "Okay sure, right, whatever" and then made their decisions citing other parts of the amendment and ignored it until the last 10 years (Slaughter-House cases). At least, that's what I was taught. That said Tom Veil's points about incorporation were actually related to the due process clause so a lot of what he said stands. I think we'd be essentially a neo-apartheid state without it.
 
The United States Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment on June 13, 1866 and, by July 9, 1868, three-fourths of the states (28 of 37) ratified the amendment:[50]

1. Connecticut (June 25, 1866)
2. New Hampshire (July 6, 1866)
3. Tennessee (July 19, 1866)
4. New Jersey (September 11, 1866)*
5. Oregon (September 19, 1866)
6. Vermont (October 30, 1866)
7. Ohio (January 4, 1867)*
8. New York (January 10, 1867)
9. Kansas (January 11, 1867)
10. Illinois (January 15, 1867)
11. West Virginia (January 16, 1867)
12. Michigan (January 16, 1867)
13. Minnesota (January 16, 1867)
14. Maine (January 19, 1867)
15. Nevada (January 22, 1867)
16. Indiana (January 23, 1867)
17. Missouri (January 25, 1867)
18. Rhode Island (February 7, 1867)
19. Wisconsin (February 7, 1867)
20. Pennsylvania (February 12, 1867)
21. Massachusetts (March 20, 1867)
22. Nebraska (June 15, 1867)
23. Iowa (March 16, 1868)
24. Arkansas (April 6, 1868)
25. Florida (June 9, 1868)
26. North Carolina (July 4, 1868, after having rejected it on December 14, 1866)
27. Louisiana (July 9, 1868, after having rejected it on February 6, 1867)
28. South Carolina (July 9, 1868, after having rejected it on December 20, 1866)

*Ohio passed a resolution that purported to withdraw its ratification on January 15, 1868. The New Jersey legislature also tried to rescind its ratification on February 20, 1868. The New Jersey governor had vetoed his state's withdrawal on March 5, and the legislature overrode the veto on March 24. Accordingly, on July 20, 1868, Secretary of State William H. Seward certified that the amendment had become part of the Constitution if the rescissions were ineffective. The Congress responded on the following day, declaring that the amendment was part of the Constitution and ordering Seward to promulgate the amendment.

Meanwhile, two additional states had ratified the amendment:

1. Alabama (July 13, 1868, the date the ratification was "approved" by the governor)
2. Georgia (July 21, 1868, after having rejected it on November 9, 1866)

Thus, on July 28, Seward was able to certify unconditionally that the amendment was part of the Constitution without having to endorse the Congress's assertion that the withdrawals were ineffective.

There were additional ratifications and rescissions; by 2003, the amendment had been ratified by all of the 37 states that were in the Union in 1868:[51]

1. Virginia (October 8, 1869, after having rejected it on January 9, 1867)
2. Mississippi (January 17, 1870)
3. Texas (February 18, 1870, after having rejected it on October 27, 1866)
4. Delaware (February 12, 1901, after having rejected it on February 7, 1867)
5. Maryland (1959)
6. California (1959)
7. Oregon(1973, after withdrawing it on October 15, 1868)
8. Kentucky (1976, after having rejected it on January 8, 1867)
9. New Jersey (2003, after having rescinded on February 20, 1868)
10. Ohio (2003, after having rescinded on January 15, 1868)
Note that all the ex Confederate approvals are by the military Governments.
President Andrew Johnson continued Lincoln's lenient plans despite the widespread bitterness over Lincoln's assassination. Johnson appointed new governors in the summer of 1865, and quickly declared that the war goals of national unity and the ending of slavery had been achieved, so that reconstruction was completed. Republicans in Congress refused to accept Johnson's lenient terms, rejected the new members of Congress selected by the South, and in 1865-66 broke with the president. A sweeping Republican victory in the 1866 Congressional elections in the North gave the Radical Republicans enough control of Congress that they over-rode Johnson's vetoes and began what is called "Radical reconstruction" in 1867.
Congress removed the civilian governments in the South[2] in 1867 and put the former Confederacy under the rule of the U.S. Army. The army then conducted new elections in which the freed slaves could vote while those who held leading positions under the Confederacy were denied the vote and could not run for office.
It was the South's blanket refusal to approve the 14th amendment, that sparked the removal of the Civilian Governments.
 
Privileges or immunities is actually rather meaningless. The court didn't really know what it meant and essentially said "Okay sure, right, whatever" and then made their decisions citing other parts of the amendment and ignored it until the last 10 years (Slaughter-House cases). At least, that's what I was taught. That said Tom Veil's points about incorporation were actually related to the due process clause so a lot of what he said stands. I think we'd be essentially a neo-apartheid state without it.

Prior to the the Slaughterhouse Cases, 'privileges & immunities' did have a distinct meaning, that of the rights fundamental to all citizens under a free government, such as life, liberty, property, and opportunity to seek personal gain, and the purpose of the original Privileges & Immunities Clause (Art.4, Sect. 2) was held to be to protect those rights from state interference, including a state discriminating against citizens of another state in favor of its own citizens. A good example of this can be found in the case of Corfield v. Coryell, 6 Fed. Cas. 550 (No. 3,230) (C.C.E.D.Pa. 1825).

What happened in Slaughterhouse is that a 5-4 majority of the court took a rather narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment, construing its purposes as preventing attempts to restore a de facto state of slavery through circuitous means and protecting those rights contained in the US Constitution from federal interference, misquoting the Privileges & Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment in the process, along with a general reluctance to interfere with state governments. The dissents in that case pointed out the misreading of the Privileges & Immunities Clause, as well as there being nothing surprising or unusual about the 14th Amendment or the Bill of Rights being interpreted as being binding upon states given the existence of other constitutional provisions restricting what states could do.

Then as you said, further jurisprudence involving the 14th Amendment & attempts to incorporate the Bill of Rights & other constitutional amendments as binding on the states & provide national protections for individual rights against state abuses focused on the 'equal protection' & 'due process' clauses of the 14th, and the Privileges & Immunties Clause became something of a dead letter.

However, over the last decade or so, some strict-constructionists, most notable Justice Thomas, have argued for reviving the original meaning of the Privileges & Immunities Clause as a replacement for the case law using 'equal protection' & 'due process' clauses as a basis for the protection of individual rights, arguing that the case law for those clauses is scattered, confusing, and provides too much of a vehicle for courts to impose their policy preferences under the guise of protecting individual rights, but their argument hasn't gained much traction in legal circles outside of that particular stripe of strict constructionist (which could be a good thing as some of those types use such lines of thought for arguing for overturning a lot of decisions expanding individual rights from the last 40 years, particularly those which are based on implied privacy rights, such as Roe v. Wade & Lawrence v. Texas, or that they think were based on courts imposing their own notions of fairness into constitutional law...)


 
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