The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, was recently voted America’s Most Significant Document. (Photo/Pexels.com)
By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
May 8, 2026
In the aftermath of the Civil War, as the United States was grappling with how to stitch itself back together, while still ensuring the soldiers who gave their lives fighting to save the Republic had not died in vain, the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was crafted.
The amendment, nearly 440 words, was passed by Congress on June 13, 1866, and ratified by the states on July 9, 1868. It established birth \right citizenship and guaranteed due process and equal protection. Also, it prohibited anyone who “engaged in insurrection” from holding any civil, military or elected office without the approval of two-thirds of the U.S. House and Senate.
Together, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, ratified between 1865 and 1870, are known as the Reconstruction Amendments.
Gerard Magliocca, a professor at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, who has studied and written extensively about the 14th Amendment, described the three amendments born in the immediate years after the war between the states as a “second Constitution.” They turned the country from slavery toward equal rights for all, including those who had previously been slaves.
Ratification of the 14th Amendment was not easy, Magliocca said. The country had an extended debate, with strong feelings and harsh words on both sides.
However, the passage of time has provided some perspective and shown the importance of the amendment. In fact, a nationwide, nine-month competition highlighting 100 of America’s historical papers selected from the National Archives, culminated in March with the 14th Amendment being named “America’s Most Significant Document.”
Schoolchildren, teens and adults in all 50 states voted in the first-of-its-kind competition, conducted by the National Archives Foundation and More Perfect, an American alliance working to revitalize democracy. In the last four weeks of the contest, the documents went head-to-head in a March Madness style online tournament.
The championship pitted the 14th Amendment against – perhaps appropriately – the 13th Amendment.
Magliocca was hesitant to single out the 14th Amendment, among all the others, as the most significant in American history, but he took some time to sit down with The Indiana Citizen and share his insights into the function and aspirations of that document.
The question-and-answer interview has been edited for clarity.
Question: The 14th Amendment was crafted and passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. What attitudes and concerns were bubbling in society at that time?
GM: One way you can think of it is that the 14th Amendment is the peace treaty between the North and the South. So, the North has won the war and there was this discussion on what the terms should be for bringing the South back into the country and how harsh should they be. That’s really the discussion that people were having throughout the country for about two years, or maybe three years, after the end of the war.
Q: In your book about John Bingham, who wrote the provisions in the 14th Amendment that guarantee rights and equality for all Americans, you talk about how that amendment transformed the Constitution. How did the 14th bring the country into another era following the Civil War?
GM: We’re really doing something new. A lot of people would say that the amendments at the time of reconstruction almost are like a new constitution. The first constitution was much more pro slavery, much more focused on states’ rights. And the second constitution is anti-slavery, of course, and more focused on national power, and kind of committed to a much greater extent to equal rights right on the basis of race.
Q: The amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868. How easy was ratification?
GM: The Republicans, who were the supporters of the amendment at the time, won decisively in the elections, and that was taken as a kind of mandate for the ratification of this amendment. The Southerners were, in effect, being dragged kicking and screaming into ratifying it. And that posed a problem later, because, basically, they did everything they could to frustrate its implementation. That, in some ways, is a kind of inevitable problem of a civil war of how do you get the losers to acquiesce to what the winners want?
Q: The 14th Amendment has five sections. The first section focuses on citizenship, the scope of which is now being debated in the birthright citizenship case that is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Why do we see citizenship in this post-Civil War amendment?
GM: The first thing they wanted to do was to overrule the Dred Scott decision, which had said before the Civil War that Blacks could not be citizens of the United States. So, the first sentence basically defines citizenship for the first time, because the Constitution as originally written did not have a definition of citizenship. And, of course, it means that Blacks can be citizens. They’re born or naturalized, just like anybody else.
The second goal is to say citizenship includes certain kinds of rights. So, then the second sentence of the first section is basically saying, here are the rights of citizens that no state shall deny. And then says that all persons are entitled to due process of law and equal protection of the law.
Q: You have described the amendment’s second section as “unworkable.” What is problematic about that provision?
GM: The second section tried to settle the question of “What should we do about voting by Black men and by women?” The problem at the time was the country didn’t really have a consensus on what to do, but something had to be done. So, the drafters tried to come up with what turned out to be kind of an unworkable formula, which said a state that denies voting rights to Black men will suffer a penalty in terms of fewer representatives in Congress.
That was unworkable for all sorts of reasons. First of all, it was hard figure out how many people were being denied the right to vote, or why they were being denied the right to vote. And even if people did figure that out, then they were not really sure what they were supposed to do about that. So, it was never enforced.
A couple of years later, the 15th Amendment was ratified, which just says, you can’t discriminate on the basis of race in voting. They didn’t have enough support for that when the 14th Amendment was written, so the second section is not entirely superseded, but largely kind of disappears.
Q: The remaining sections of the amendment tackle the issue of reintegrating the South back into the country. What were some of the problems or concerns the third, fourth and fifth sections were attempting to solve?
GM: The third section addressed what should happen to the leaders of the Confederacy. And, of course, the answer, pretty much, was, we were not going to criminally prosecute them, but we were going to exclude them from office until such time as Congress saw fit to let them back in.
Some people were barred for their entire lifetime. For others, Congress did say at some point, because you’ve shown that you’ve done your penance, or because we just think that enough time has gone by and it’s all right now, you’re allowed to serve in office again.
The fourth section has two parts. One addressed the concern that the Southern states might refuse to authorize payments on the debt that had been racked up during the Civil War, or the payments of pensions to Union soldiers or their widows. So, one provision said the debt must be paid. The other provision addressed the concern over the Confederate debt. There were Confederate bonds during the war and, if these states tried to pay those bonds off, people just thought that would be preposterous and it shouldn’t be allowed. So, they barred that. Most important of all was what would happen if a former slave owner went to their state and said, ‘I deserve some money for the loss of my slaves,’ because, of course, the emancipation of the slaves did not include compensation for the owners. People thought it would just be morally wrong, for the South to be compensated for their ownership of other people. So, the section also bars any state from doing that.
The fifth section just says Congress has power to implement this as it sees fit, more or less.
Q: Many of the court cases that have expanded individual rights, such as voting rights and same sex marriage, have hinged on the guarantees provided in the 14th Amendment. How did that amendment become so pivotal?
GM: Some of it is because the language that the drafters chose to use was broad. And that was a deliberate decision to not make it more specific. Second, a lot of times when people are bringing a lawsuit, they’re challenging a law from a state, and, of course, the 14th Amendment speaks directly to what states can’t do. So, it’s the sort of “go to place” for a constitutional challenge to a state law right now.
The other thing is that, especially in modern times, people see the Civil War as a major achievement in advancing liberty and equality. Therefore, they’re going to look to that time as a kind of model for how they’re supposed to think about a contemporary problem. The other way you can think of it, although people differ about this, is, in some sense, the amendment represents Lincoln’s views. In other words, you look at Lincoln’s speeches, the Gettysburg Address being one example, that’s the spirit of what the 14th Amendment then tries to write up in prose.
Q: You have written that, initially, the courts interpreted the 14th Amendment very narrowly. How did the judiciary go from this narrow view to broader view of today?
GM: All constitutional provisions are interpreted narrowly at the beginning and broader later. Judges tend to be cautious, and so they’re not going to give a very expansive interpretation right away. Secondly, you need to get some perspective. In the immediate aftermath of an event, it’s hard to get a kind of bigger picture view of what’s going on. Ten years later, or 50 years later, or whatever, you have a different view, and maybe in some ways, a better view of what happened than someone in the immediate aftermath.
Q: How important is the 14th Amendment to American democracy? How much did it shape the country we have today?
GM: The 14th Amendment is fundamental, because, first of all, it’s defining citizenship. So citizenship is sort of the bedrock of our country. The second thing is the guarantee of rights and equality. You know, there is no equality guarantee in the Constitution as originally written. There couldn’t have been, because there was slavery.
The third element addresses our rights. We disagree somewhat on what the rights are or exactly what they mean, but everybody agrees that we have rights.
Q: As a mechanism for trying to get us to a more perfect union, what do you see as the future of the 14th Amendment?
GM: Well, people are going to continue to appeal to it for whatever their goals might be. Now, of course, what that could be depends on sort of where public opinion is to some extent, and how that gets channeled into lawsuits. So, in other words, it doesn’t have to be in a liberal direction or a conservative direction. I mean, it could be either, because the language is broad enough to encompass all of that. And people’s understanding of liberty and equality also changes over time. So, it’s a little hard to know.
Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.
The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org