Dr. Spiegelman
APUSH-Period 2
Law Day Essay Competition
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in July 1868, led to a great change in American society and it reshaped American law and life since its ratification. It really over turned the decision of a famous earlier Supreme Court Case, Dred Scott vs Sanford, which was a decision that held that neither freed slaves or their descendants could become US citizens. With the ratification of the 14th Amendment, this changed; it granted citizenship to any person born or naturalized in the US, and this did incorporate recently freed slaves. One major addition that the 14th Amendment added was that it forbade any of the states from denying individuals