John Bingham - Later Life

Later Life

In 1866, during the Thirty-ninth Congress, Bingham was appointed to a subcommittee of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction tasked with considering suffrage proposals. As a member of the subcommittee, Bingham submitted several versions of an amendment to the U.S. Constitution which would serve to apply the Bill of Rights to the States. His final submission, which was accepted by the Committee on April 28, 1866, read "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, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Committee recommended that the language become Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Amendment was introduced in the spring of 1866, passing both houses by June 1866.

In the closing debate in the House, Bingham stated,

"any instances of State injustice and oppression have already occurred in the State legislation of this Union, of flagrant violations of the guarantied privileges of citizens of the United States, for which the national Government furnished and could furnish by law no remedy whatever. Contrary to the express letter of your Constitution, 'cruel and unusual punishments' have been inflicted under State laws within this Union upon citizens, not only for crimes committed, but for sacred duty done, for which and against which the Government of the United States had provided no remedy and could provide none. It was an opprobrium to the Republic that for fidelity to the United States they could not by national law be protected against the degrading punishment inflicted on slaves and felons by State law. That great want of the citizen and stranger, protection by national law from unconstitutional State enactments, is supplied by the first section of this amendment."

Except for the addition of the first sentence of Section 1, which defined citizenship, the amendment weathered the Senate debate without substantial change. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868.

Despite Bingham's likely intention that the 14th Amendment apply the first eight Amendments of the Bill of Rights to the States, the U.S. Supreme Court subsequently declined to interpret it that way in the Slaughter-House Cases and United States v. Cruikshank. In the 1947 case of Adamson v. California, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black argued in his dissent that the framers' intent should control the Court's interpretation of the 14th Amendment, and he attached a lengthy appendix that quoted extensively from Bingham's congressional testimony. Though the Adamson Court declined to adopt Black's interpretation, the Court during the following twenty-five years employed a doctrine of selective incorporation that succeeded in extending to the States almost of all of the protections in the Bill of Rights, as well as other, unenumerated rights. The Court, in the case of McDonald v. Chicago, decided that the Second Amendment incorporates to the states. Along with asking for selective incorporation, the petitioners are asking the Court to overturn the Slaughter-House Cases and apply total incorporation.

The 14th Amendment has vastly expanded civil rights protections and is cited in more litigation than any other amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Bingham continued his career as a congressman, being reelected to the Fortieth, Forty-first and Forty-second Congresses. He served as Chairman of the Committee on Claims from 1867 to 1869 and a member of the Committee on the Judiciary from 1869 to 1873. In 1868 he was one of the judges involved in the impeachment trials of President Andrew Johnson. In 1872, he was unsuccessful in gaining reelection, this time for the Forty-third Congress. President Ulysses Grant then appointed him a new position as United States Minister to Japan, at which he served from May 31, 1873 to July 2, 1885.

He died in Cadiz, Ohio on March 19, 1900. He was interred in Union Cemetery in Cadiz.