July 9, 2025.

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the 14th time,

adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systemic black enslavement.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race,

but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln,

white Southern Democrats had done their best to push their black neighbors back into subservience.

So long as Southern states had abolished enslavement,

repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to

readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy

and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused.

There was no way they were going to rebuild Southern society

on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War,

especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count black Americans as whole persons for

the first time in the nation's history, giving Southern states more power in Congress and

the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to

destroy the South's ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson's plan for reconstruction. But then congressmen had to come up with their own.

After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding

questions of the war.

Chief among those was how to protect the rights of black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress's solution was the 14th Amendment. It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision

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