July 28 · This Day in America
Secretary of State William Seward certifies that the Fourteenth Amendment has been ratified, and with that signature it becomes the supreme law of the land. In a single sentence it overturns Dred Scott and rewrites who America belongs to: all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens of it. No state may deny any person life, liberty, or property without due process, nor deny anyone the equal protection of the laws. It is the promise of 1776 finally written into enforceable law — three years after a war that killed three quarters of a million Americans to settle whether it could be. Nearly every expansion of American freedom since — desegregation, the vote, marriage, the very idea that the Bill of Rights restrains the states — runs back through these words. The country had been re-founded, on purpose, in writing.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1932
Thousands of World War I veterans, jobless in the Depression, had camped in Washington for months asking for the bonus they were promised. On this day federal troops under Douglas MacArthur clear them out — cavalry, bayonets, tear gas, the shanty camp across the Anacostia set ablaze. Two veterans are dead. The newsreels run for weeks. A nation that had cheered these men off to France watched them burned out of its capital, and did not forget.
Source: www.nps.gov
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”Fourteenth Amendment, 1868