14th Amendment laid foundation of civil liberties
Updated: MAY 8, 2016 — 3:01 AM EDT
Allen C. Guelzo
... The Constitution contains no directions on how to conduct a civil war, much less what to do afterward. The Constitution contained language .. about securing the "Privileges and Immunities of Citizens," but this was .. understood as requiring each state to grant to citizens of other states the same .. it granted its own ... It said nothing about what those rights were, or whether the federal government had any enforcement power. It wasn't even clear what was meant by citizens.
The defeated Southerners took shameless advantage of this. They promptly elected to Congress former Confederate generals and politicians, talked freely about making the federal government pick up the tab for the Confederacy's war debt, and, far from extending any "privileges and immunities of Citizens" to the freed slaves, they erupted into .. massive .. bloody race riots in New Orleans and Memphis ...
The 14th Amendment ... finally provided a constitutional definition for citizenship: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." No matter what their race, language, or parents might be, being born on United States soil made you a citizen - something which very plainly included the former slaves ...
... the 14th, with its language of "equal protection" and "due process" has been the foundation of some of the most important civil liberties debates of our times ...
http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/20160508_Commentary__14th_Amendment_laid_foundation_of_civil_liberties.html