When Did the 14th Amendment Pass? 1866 Vote and 1868 Ratification

Congress passed the 14th Amendment on June 13, 1866, when the House approved the Senate’s revised text by a vote of 120 to 32. It became part of the Constitution on July 28, 1868, when Secretary of State William Seward certified that the required three-fourths of the states had ratified it.¹ The two-year gap between those dates covers one of the most contested ratification fights in American history.

Congressional Passage in 1866

The amendment moved through Congress as House Joint Resolution 127, drafted out of the work of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, a fifteen-member body Congress created in December 1865 to decide how seceded states could regain their seats. The committee interviewed 144 witnesses about conditions in the South before settling on the language that became the amendment.²

The House first passed the resolution on May 10, 1866, by a vote of 128 to 37. The Senate approved an amended version on June 8, 1866. Because the Senate had changed the text, the House had to vote again on the revised language, which it did on June 13, 1866, passing the final version 120 to 32.³ Seward transmitted the proposed amendment to the state governors on June 16, 1866, starting the ratification clock.¹

The State Ratification Path

Article V of the Constitution requires three-fourths of the states to approve any amendment. With 37 states in the Union in 1866, the threshold was 28.¹

Connecticut moved first, ratifying on June 25, 1866, just nine days after the amendment reached the states.⁴ Northern and western states supplied steady approvals through 1866 and 1867, but the count stalled. Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland rejected the amendment outright. None of the three would ratify in the nineteenth century. Delaware finally did so in 1901, Maryland in 1959, and Kentucky not until 1976.⁵ Most former Confederate states initially rejected the amendment as well.

The stalemate broke in 1868 as Southern legislatures reversed course. South Carolina and Louisiana both ratified on July 9, 1868, pushing the total to the 28 required and clearing the constitutional threshold.⁶

Why Ratification Took Two Years

The math only worked because Congress made ratification a condition of readmission for former Confederate states. The Reconstruction Act of 1867 (14 Stat. 428) divided the South into five military districts and required each state to write a new constitution, extend voting rights to Black men, and ratify the 14th Amendment before it could regain representation in Congress.⁷ The act provided that once a state completed those steps and the amendment became part of the Constitution, military governance would end for that state.⁸

Several Southern legislatures had already voted the amendment down before the Reconstruction Acts passed. North Carolina rejected it in December 1866, South Carolina in December 1866, and Louisiana in February 1867. All three reversed course and ratified in 1868 under the conditions Congress imposed.⁶ Whether those ratifications were truly voluntary remains a live debate among constitutional historians, though no court has ever treated the amendment as anything other than validly adopted.

The Rescission Controversy

Two states that initially voted yes tried to take it back. New Jersey ratified in September 1866, then passed a resolution in early 1868 attempting to withdraw its consent. The governor vetoed the withdrawal, and the legislature overrode him.⁹ Ohio followed a similar path, rescinding its ratification in 1868. Whether a state can legally un-ratify a constitutional amendment was an open question then, and courts have never definitively settled it. Congress effectively answered it by counting both states as ratifiers anyway.

New Jersey eventually came full circle. In 2003, the state legislature passed a resolution officially revoking its 1868 withdrawal and reaffirming its ratification.⁹

Certification and the Official Date

Even after 28 states had ratified, the finish line was messier than it should have been. Seward issued a proclamation on July 20, 1868, but he hedged it with qualifications. He flagged that some of the Southern ratifications came from state governments installed under military authority, and he openly questioned whether the Ohio and New Jersey rescissions were valid. His proclamation essentially said the amendment was ratified if those rescissions did not count. That conditional language satisfied no one.

Congress stepped in the next day. On July 21, 1868, it passed a concurrent resolution flatly declaring the amendment ratified and listing 29 states, including Ohio and New Jersey, as having approved it.¹⁰ Seward then issued a second, unconditional proclamation on July 28, 1868, certifying the 14th Amendment as part of the Constitution without reservation.⁶ That date is generally treated as the official ratification date.

What the Amendment Established

The amendment’s five sections cover a lot of ground. Section 1 declares that anyone born or naturalized in the United States is a citizen, overturning the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. It also bars states from cutting back the rights of citizens, taking anyone’s life, liberty, or property without due process, or denying anyone equal protection under the law.¹¹

Section 2 changed how congressional seats are apportioned. Under the original Constitution, enslaved people counted as three-fifths of a person for that purpose. The 14th Amendment counted everyone fully but penalized states that blocked eligible male citizens from voting by shrinking their congressional representation proportionally.¹²

Section 3 bars anyone who swore an oath to the Constitution and then participated in insurrection from holding federal or state office, with Congress able to lift the ban by a two-thirds vote in each chamber. Section 4 guarantees the validity of U.S. public debt while voiding any debts incurred to support rebellion, including claims for compensation related to emancipation. Section 5 gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment through legislation.¹²

1
National Archives. 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Civil Rights
2
U.S. Capitol – Visitor Center. Handwritten Final Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction
3
Library of Congress. Digital Collections – 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
4
House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College. In Hartford, the Connecticut Legislature Votes to Ratify the Fourteenth Amendment
5
Notable Kentucky African Americans Database. Ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (Kentucky)
6
U.S. Government Publishing Office. Constitution, Jeffersons Manual, and the Rules of the House of Representatives, 112th Congress
7
United States Senate. The Civil War: The Senates Story – Landmark Legislation: The Reconstruction Act of 1867
8
GovTrack. 14 Stat. 428 – An Act to Provide for the More Efficient Government of the Rebel States
9
New Jersey Department of State. 14th Amendment
10
Congress.gov. Civil War Amendments (Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth)
11
Legal Information Institute. 14th Amendment
12
Congress.gov. U.S. Constitution – Fourteenth Amendment