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Show 140 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co. and the Constitutional Divides Over how to Reconstruct a Nation Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 with the purpose of extending equal protection to former slaves in the American South. While the Thirteenth Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation formally freed the men, women, and children shackled to the bondages of slavery, more measures were needed to secure their equal rights as citizens of this postwar nation. With the intention of fulfilling these duties, the first section of Fourteenth Amendment stated that actions of states and local officials must adhere to federal standards of governance, especially when considering questions of citizenship and due process of the law. The Fourteenth Amendment declares, 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. It is clear that the Reconstruction Amendments posed dramatic challenges for Southern states now forced to reconstruct their governance in accordance with federal standards of equality. Particularly, the equal protection clause of this section, which declared that no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the "equal protection of the laws," was an attempt to boldly confront Southern heritages of slavery and integrate these states into the Union. Designed to affirm the provisions of equality stated in the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the majority of cases brought before the Court regarding equal protection did not even involve freed black slaves. Out of the 150 post Civil War Supreme Court cases that involved the Fourteenth Amendment before Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), only 15 of them involved African Americans seeking due process of the law (Hammerstrom, |
