THE 14TH AMENDMENT: FROM DRED SCOTT TO BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP — DID WE LOSE THE ORIGINAL INTENT?

MAGA Viral opinion graphic for TD Simon’s article on the 14th Amendment, Dred Scott, and birthright citizenship.

America is once again debating birthright citizenship, and at the center of that argument are these words from the Fourteenth Amendment:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States…”

Those words were ratified in 1868.

But before we argue about what they mean today, we should ask a more basic question:

Why were they written in the first place?

That question takes us directly to one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in American history: Dred Scott v. Sandford.

In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott, an enslaved man who had lived in free territory and later sued for his freedom.

But the Court went much further than deciding whether Scott should be free.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney’s majority opinion held that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States.

Think about what that meant.

A Black person could be born in America, live in America, work in America, raise a family in America, and still be told that he could never fully belong to the political community that created the Constitution.

Then came the Civil War.

Slavery was destroyed. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished it.

But freedom did not automatically settle the question of citizenship.

What was the status of the millions of formerly enslaved men, women, and children who were now free?

Congress answered first with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that people born in the United States, with certain exceptions recognized at the time, were citizens and could not be denied civil rights because of race, color, or previous condition of slavery.

But a law passed by Congress can be changed by another Congress.

If citizenship was going to be permanently protected, it had to be written into the Constitution.

That is where the Fourteenth Amendment comes in.

The historical sequence matters:

Dred Scott. Civil War. Emancipation. Thirteenth Amendment. Civil Rights Act of 1866. Fourteenth Amendment.

That is the road that led to the Citizenship Clause.

The Fourteenth Amendment was not written in a vacuum.

It was written in the aftermath of slavery, Civil War, and a Supreme Court decision that had denied Black Americans national citizenship.

That was the constitutional wrong Congress was trying to correct.

But here is where the modern debate becomes more complicated.

The amendment does not simply say:

All persons born in the United States are citizens.

It says:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof…”

Those additional words have to mean something.

So the real historical question is not whether the Fourteenth Amendment created a broad rule of birthright citizenship. It clearly did.

The question is:

How broad was that rule intended to be?

My concern with the modern debate is that people often quote the amendment without discussing the historical emergency that caused it to be written.

The Fourteenth Amendment was not drafted to deal with twenty-first-century illegal immigration.

It was written to make certain that the United States could never again deny citizenship to American-born people because they had been enslaved or because of their race.

Now, does that mean the amendment applied only to former slaves?

No.

That argument goes too far.

The authors deliberately wrote “all persons.”

That language matters.

But so does the world in which those words were written.

Would the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment have understood it to guarantee automatic citizenship to the child of parents who entered the United States unlawfully and remained here without legal status?

That is not the question they were facing in 1866.

And it is fair to ask whether modern application has moved beyond the circumstances they were primarily trying to address.

Anyone making that argument also has to deal honestly with United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was an American citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment.

That case became one of the foundations of the modern understanding of birthright citizenship.

But there is an important distinction.

Wong Kim Ark’s parents were established, domiciled residents of the United States.

They were not people who had entered the country illegally and remained without lawful status.

That does not automatically answer today’s debate.

But it does mean the exact modern question is not identical to the one decided in 1898.

My reading of the history is simple:

The Citizenship Clause came directly out of the failure of Dred Scott, the destruction of slavery, and the need to secure citizenship for formerly enslaved Americans and their descendants.

That historical purpose should never be ignored.

There is a serious argument on the other side. The amendment says “all persons born,” and the Supreme Court has read that language broadly.

That matters too.

But before we argue about what the Fourteenth Amendment means in 2026, we should first understand why it was written in 1866.

Dred Scott denied citizenship to people born here because of race and ancestry. The Fourteenth Amendment was America’s answer to that injustice.

That does not settle every modern immigration question.

But it should absolutely be where the conversation begins.

History should come before the argument.