Episode 1 of 2
Tennessee Ratifies Fourteenth Amendment
- When
- July 18, 1866
- Where
- State Legislature
Tennessee became the first Confederate state to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment on July 18, 1866, granting citizenship and equal protection to former slaves.
The Fourteenth Amendment, proposed in 1866, guaranteed United States citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. Tennessee's ratification on July 18, 1866, preceded the national ratification in 1868. This action was part of the state's efforts to meet federal requirements for readmission, following its earlier ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in April 1865.
Sources
- Tennessee Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-25
- Reconstruction era Wikipedia
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.