Jefferson was way way ahead of his time. Are we really citizens of our government, or are we subjects?
In Jefferson's United States we were neither, of course, the 14th changed all of that so I guess we are subjects once again.
The 14th Amendment was intended to grant blacks equal citizenship as whites once slavery was abolished, however this is not what happened. Instead, the 14th amendment was instead interpreted by the courts to mean that businesses are lead by people and thus should be recognized legally as having the same rights as human citizens. The 14th amendment also instead was interpreted by southern states as giving the states the right to segregate society so blacks legally were citizens, under federal law, but did not have the same legal protections and recognitions as whites under state law, because back then the states were much so more independent of the federal government than today. Thus, the 14th amendment was then construed to make blacks into mere "subjects" rather than actual citizens, and corporations were granted more rights than the human citizens the amendment was written and passed for.
Being this is the history forum I will respectfully leave all rants aside (for POFO) In reply: 1. I didn't state if good or bad only change, which it did. 2. I want to be a citizen (and am) of this country not it's government thus I hold the constitution to a far greater loyalty. 3. The 14th has been used for both good and bad purposes, as has the rest of our Constitution, by the clowns in the federal government imvho.
Also wanted to say it's the only word that he really changed (we went over this in my history class) and it was just so ingrained in the people's brains at the time that they were "subjects" because they were coming from a monarchy type government, so jefferson thought "absolutely not" and changed it to "citizens".
