Seward proclaims it law: the Fourteenth Amendment is part of the Constitution
Three years after Appomattox, the Constitution still had no answer for who counted as a citizen. Dred Scott's ruling that Black Americans could never be citizens remained unreversed by the document itself. On July 9, 1868, the twenty-eighth state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection to anyone born on American soil. Secretary of State William Seward officially proclaimed it adopted on July 27, after previously certifying it conditionally on July 20.
Every American born on U.S. soil owes their citizenship to this amendment, not the original Constitution, which never defined the term. Its Equal Protection Clause later became the legal foundation for Brown v. Board, Loving v. Virginia, and Obergefell v. Hodges, making it the most frequently litigated part of the Constitution.
