One of the most significant constitutional consequences of
the Civil War, however, was adoption of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment in 1868. It provides in part, "No State shall make or enforce
any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens
of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law." These clauses,
called the privileges and immunities clause and the due process
clause respectively, were thus restrictions on the powers of the
states. Litigants before the Supreme Court soon sought to convert
the clauses into guarantees of a broad spectrum of rights against
state power, including the rights in the Bill of Rights.

The Supreme Court proved highly resistant to arguments that
the Fourteenth Amendment altered the federal system in such a
fundamental way. In the Slaughter House Cases, decided in 1873,
the Court held that most of the significant civil and political rights
of individuals against exercises of state power still derived from
state law and state constitutions. The Court refused to read the
privileges and immunities clause as guaranteeing any significant
rights against state power, thus essentially reducing that clause to a
dead letter. Similarly, in Hurtado v. California, in 1884, the Court
adopted reasoning that denied that any of the rights in the Bill of
Rights could be guaranteed by the due process clause against state
action. The Fourteenth Amendment, at this point, did not show
much potential as a guarantee of civil and political liberties against
the states.

Despite the reasoning adopted in Hurtado, however, the
Court held in 1897, in Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Ry. v.
Chicago, that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amend-
ment required the states to provide just compensation for private
property that was taken for a public use. (This right was guaran-
teed to people against the national government by the just
compensation clause of the Fifth Amendment.) And in Twining v.
New Jersey in 1908 the Court conceded that the due process
clause of the Fourteenth Amendment might guarantee against
state action some rights that were similar to those in the Bill of
Rights. Seventeen years later, in Gitlow v. New York, the Court
assumed that the freedoms of speech and of the press were
guaranteed against state action by the word "liberty" in the due

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