ABSTRACT
In Barron v. City of Baltimore (1833), the US Supreme Court had to decide if the Bill of Rights, which the federal government was bound to honor, applied to the individual states as well. The facts in Barron involved Baltimore's diversion of streams in the course of road construction that had resulted in the deposit of silt in a private wharf, making it unusable. Barron v. Baltimore remains the generally accepted interpretation of the original intention of the Bill of Rights. However, there is evidence that some of the proponents of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, intended not only to eliminate discriminatory state actions but also to overturn the decision in Barron and see that states were bound by the same constitutional guarantees as was the national government. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Court held that almost all provisions of the Bill of Rights were fundamental and thus applied to the national government and the states.
