Over time, the Fourteenth Amendment would lead many Americans to view the federal government as the ultimate protector of their rights and to expand the definition of those rights far beyond anything known before the Civil War, or anticipated by the Thirty-ninth Congress. But the rights revolution launched by the war and emancipation was not yet complete. The very ambiguity of the language of Section 1 left it uncertain how radical a shift had taken place in the relative powers of the state and federal governments and what specific rights and entitlements were now being guaranteed by national
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