Colfax vs. The President: The Battle for the 14th Amendment

South Bend's Schuyler Colfax defied a sitting president, rallied Congress, and helped enshrine birthright citizenship and equal protection into the Constitution

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JULY 10, 2025

The 14th Amendment was ratified into law on July 9, 1868. As far as legislation goes, it's a pretty short piece of work, checking in at barely 400 words and printing easily onto one side of a single sheet of paper. It's a quick read.

At its core, the Amendment establishes birthright citizenship and guarantees that all of those citizens — regardless of race, creed, or origin — are entitled to equal protection under the laws of the United States. The 14th Amendment has been the law of the land for nearly 160 years.

Now, it's apparently very controversial.

But before it was a sudden political lightning rod and before it was the subject of Supreme Court showdowns and presidential disqualifications, the 14th Amendment was just an idea — bold, radical, fragile, and far from a guarantee. It would take a lot of politicking before the 14th Amendment became a reality, and there's one man who deserves the lion's share of the credit for getting the thing passed:

Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House of Representatives, hailing from South Bend, Indiana.

Schuyler Colfax served seven terms in the House beginning in 1855. He was there during the run up to the Civil War. He was there when the Confederate states seceded, when the first shots were fired. By 1863, Colfax was the Speaker of that body. He was Speaker when the South surrendered, when Lincoln was shot, when it was time to take the first steps toward Reconstruction.

Seven terms. Fourteen years that most have felt like fifty. Colfax wrote as much in his own words.

His time in the Congress had aged him and frustrated him, but he'd never quit. There were the prewar terms when the Congress was so divided that they went months without electing a Speaker, endured entire sessions without passing any legislation. There were brawls and beatings on the House floor and in the Senate's chambers.

Somehow Colfax persevered. He led the Congressional charge to pass the 13th Amendment through Congress on January 31, 1865. When the amendment was ratified on December 6 that same year, it officially abolished slavery in the United States.

Abolishing slavery was an important first step, but it created a lot more questions than it did answers. Most importantly, what exactly would happen with all of those formerly enslaved people?

Colfax led the charge on answering that question too, first by establishing the Freedmen's Bureau — an unprecedented piece of social service legislation that provided education, resources, and stability for a group of suddenly free men who had never known a world outside from under a master's thumb.

But most of all, there was the 14th Amendment. Guaranteeing birthright citizenship would make all of the freed slaves full American citizens. To do anything less would have created the impossible situation of labelling those who had lived and worked their entire lives in the nation as foreigners. For Schuyler Colfax. the guarantee of citizenship was obvious and beyond debate.

For everyone else, it was going to be a fight.

Abraham Lincoln made a mistake, and it was kind of a big one.

Ahead of his second term, he chose Andrew Johnson as his running mate. Lincoln was a northern Republican. Johnson was a southern Democrat, albeit one who'd been loyal to the Union throughout the war. Lincoln's hope was that Johnson's selection would function as a kind of olive branch toward the south. A Lincoln-Johnson ticket represented reunification, and anyway, the Vice President really didn't do very much.

Lincoln would be in charge of everything. Johnson would be a symbol.

Of course, Lincoln didn't calculate what would happen if he died, and somewhat famously, that's exactly what happened.

That meant that Andrew Johnson became President, and he might just be the most unpopular President the nation's ever had. The Civil War may have been over, but now, a new battle between the President and Congress was about to begin. Colfax resigned himself to the coming conflict, and as Speaker of the House, he took up the only weapon he had at his disposal.

His gavel.

Johnson spoke out early and often against the legislation that Colfax and the Republicans were trying to pass. They passed their legislation anyway. Johnson used his veto power. Congress overrode him.

Fifteen times they overrode his veto, and that's an American political record that's still standing. More of his vetoes were overridden than were upheld, an embarrassment of Presidential weakness that had never been seen before and has never been seen since. It only became more embarrassing when Johnson became the first American President to be impeached, surviving the process by the narrowest of margins — exactly one vote.

There haven't been many occasions where the most powerful political figure in American politics wasn't the President, but this was one of them. It was a unique moment in American history. All of a sudden, the man at the top of the political heap wasn't the one living in the White House.

It was the one holding the gavel.

Johnson was no fan of the 14th Amendment either, what with its guarantees of citizenship for anyone who'd been born here and lived a life here. But by then it was clear the Colfax and the Republicans didn't need the President's blessing to get their work done, and so they proceeded without him.

It's an incredibly hard thing to ratify an amendment, requiring a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress as well as the ratification of three-fourths of the states. To get all of that against the sitting Presidents wishes is bonkers, and it feels unlikely that such a move could ever happen again.

But Colfax did it, and if there's a moral to be made for modern times, I'll let someone else discover it. In the meantime, the next time you hear someone praising or maligning the 14th Amendment, be sure to remind them that it never would have happened without South Bend's own Schuyler Colfax.