Widening "We the People": Five Dates That Remade American Rights, 1776 to 1965
The Declaration promised that governments draw their power from the consent of the governed. Who counted among the governed was a question the United States answered again and again: in 1791, after the Civil War, in 1920 and in 1965. Each answer was won by argument, by campaign and, at times, by war.
The founding documents of the United States set out large principles and left a great deal unsettled. Who was a citizen? Whose rights did the government have to respect? Who could vote? Our timeline marks five moments when the answers changed in law: 1776, 1791, the years from 1865 to 1870, 1920 and 1965. Between them sit the stories already told on this site, the Philadelphia summer of 1787 and the election of 1800. Read together, they show the same promise being argued over, and extended, across nearly two centuries.
A Principle and a Shield: 1776 and 1791
On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in the Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia, adopted the Declaration of Independence. Its second sentence is counted among the most famous lines in world history: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Governments, it went on, derive "their just powers from the consent of the governed." It was a statement of principle, not a law, and many of the people who signed it held others in slavery.
The Constitution written in 1787 said little about individual rights, and Anti-Federalists made that a central objection during ratification. Representative James Madison studied their criticisms and drafted a series of amendments in response. On September 25, 1789, Congress approved twelve articles of amendment and sent them to the states. Ten of them were ratified on December 15, 1791, and became the Bill of Rights, protecting speech, religion, the press and the rights of people accused of crimes. They drew on older documents, including the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, the English Bill of Rights of 1689 and Magna Carta. One of the two left over had an unusually long wait: it was finally ratified on May 5, 1992, as the Twenty-seventh Amendment.
Rebuilding After War: 1865 to 1870
After the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, the Constitution went unamended for more than sixty years. The Civil War ended that. In five years, three amendments rewrote the relationship between the nation and its people. The Thirteenth, ratified by December 6, 1865, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The Fourteenth, ratified by July 9, 1868, defined citizenship and promised all persons the equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth, ratified on February 3, 1870, barred governments from denying a citizen the vote on account of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
The promise was not kept for long. State laws and federal court decisions in the late nineteenth century wore much of it away, and the full force of these amendments would not be felt for generations.
The Vote Widens: 1920 and 1965
Women had been able to vote in several colonies before 1776, but by 1807 every state constitution denied them the vote. In 1848, the convention at Seneca Falls, New York, adopted a Declaration of Sentiments that called for equality between the sexes and urged women to secure the franchise. A women's suffrage amendment was first introduced in Congress in 1878. It took until 1919 to pass both houses, and on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify it. The Nineteenth Amendment, certified on August 26, barred denying the vote on account of sex.
For Black Americans in much of the South, the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee still went unenforced, held back by literacy tests and similar devices. On March 7, 1965, marchers setting out from Selma, Alabama, toward Montgomery were stopped at the Edmund Pettus Bridge by state and county police on horseback, who fired tear gas into the crowd and trampled protesters. The televised footage of what became known as "Bloody Sunday" drew outrage across the country. On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, which outlawed literacy tests and required places with a history of discrimination to clear changes to their voting rules in advance.
The story did not stop there. Congress has amended the Act five times, and in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) the Supreme Court ended the formula that decided which places needed that advance clearance. The Constitution has now been amended twenty-seven times. Each change on this timeline was argued over fiercely in its day, and the arguments about who decides, and how, continue.
