Episode 3 of 3

Certification by Seward

When: July 20, 1868
Where: State Department
Part of: Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment

Secretary of State William H. Seward certified the amendment on July 20, 1868, assuming rescissions were invalid.

Seward certified that the amendment became law with South Carolina's ratification as the 28th state. This certification addressed the legal status of rescissions by states like Ohio and New Jersey, affirming the amendment's validity.

Sources

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-21

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.