When was the Fourteenth Amendment ratified?

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868 when South Carolina (some sources say Louisiana) became the 28th state to approve it, meeting the constitutional requirement of three quarters of the 37 states then in the Union. Secretary of State William Seward issued the certification of ratification on July 28, 1868.

The amendment had a long and contested ratification process. Congress passed the proposed text and submitted it to the states on June 13, 1866. Most northern states ratified within a year. Connecticut was first on June 25, 1866. Only Tennessee, alone among former Confederate states, ratified quickly, doing so on July 19, 1866. The other ten former Confederate states initially refused to ratify and were therefore denied congressional representation.

Congress responded with the Reconstruction Acts of March 2, 1867, July 19, 1867, and March 11, 1868, which divided the unreconstructed Confederate states into five military districts under Union army occupation, required each state to draft a new constitution providing for Black male suffrage, and made ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment a condition of restoration to the Union. Under this pressure the southern states ratified throughout 1867 and 1868. Ohio and New Jersey passed resolutions in 1867 and 1868 attempting to rescind their earlier ratifications, but Congress and Seward refused to count the rescissions, on the theory that ratification once given was final.

Seward's July 20, 1868 certification was conditional pending congressional action; Congress passed a concurrent resolution on July 21, 1868 declaring the amendment ratified, and Seward issued the final certification on July 28, 1868.

The amendment fundamentally rewrote American constitutional law. It overruled Dred Scott by establishing birthright citizenship, gave Congress power to enforce civil rights against state governments, repealed the Three-Fifths Clause, and provided the legal framework that the Supreme Court has used in landmark twentieth century cases including Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Loving v. Virginia (1967), Roe v. Wade (1973), Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), and many others. Selective incorporation through the Due Process Clause has applied most of the Bill of Rights to the states. The Equal Protection Clause has been the basis for nearly all civil rights litigation.

The Privileges or Immunities Clause was largely emptied of meaning by the Slaughter-House Cases (1873), although some modern scholars and justices argue for its revival. The Fourteenth Amendment continues to be cited in current Supreme Court cases as the vehicle for nearly every claim of state-level civil rights violation.