Slaughterhouse Cases
16 Wall. (83 U.S.) 36 (1873), argued 3–5 Feb. 1873, decided 14 Apr. 1873 by vote of 5 to 4; Miller for the Court, Field, Bradley, Chase, Swayne in dissent. The Slaughterhouse Cases consisted of three suits precipitated by a Louisiana law that incorporated the Crescent City Live‐Stock Landing and Slaughtering Company and required that all butchering of animals in New Orleans be done in its facilities. The cases provided the first important opportunity for the Supreme Court to interpret the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870. In an opinion that remains controversial but has never been overruled, the majority of the justices severely limited the meaning of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Louisiana passed the law at issue at a time when many state and local governments were enacting health reforms. Regulations to control the slaughtering of animals were enacted in many localities, because it was a business entailing grave health risks to surrounding neighborhoods in an age before modern refrigeration technology and insect control. Centralizing slaughterhouse operations was one means of regulation.
Although it was conceivable that a state itself might build and operate a new central slaughterhouse, it had been a common practice for states to incorporate privately owned businesses to assume the expense of providing needed public facilities in return for a government‐regulated monopoly. Financially strapped after the Civil War, Louisiana chose this alternative. However, this decision presented the problem of choosing who would have the privilege of incorporating the new slaughterhouse company and earning the tidy profit likely to accrue. As was usual in nineteenth‐century America, the privilege went to a group of wealthy and politically influential individuals, who brought leading politicians into the concern. Naturally, when governments chose this method to provide public services or facilities, they opened themselves to charges of corruption. Dissatisfied citizens perceived such transactions to confer illicit special privileges on the influential few at the expense of the rest of the people.
This was especially the case in Louisiana. That state was governed by Republicans, elected primarily by black voters enfranchised as part of Reconstruction. Most white Louisianans believed that the white leaders of the Louisiana Republican party were “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags,” interested solely in plunder. Democrats charged that the slaughterhouse law was another example of Republican corruption, even though both Democrats and Republicans were among the incorporators of the Crescent City Company.
The slaughterhouse laws imposed by the states seriously inconvenienced butchers. Some of them were accustomed to slaughtering animals on their own property. Others, like those in New Orleans, had formed trade associations that operated slaughterhouses. Now they were required to undertake their business at a distance from the city and often at a single center where they were required to pay fees. In many places affected butchers filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the laws. However, few litigants or counsel in the late 1860s and early 1870s perceived the potential of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the ordinary rights of white citizens; it had been discussed almost entirely in terms of the slavery controversy. Therefore the butchers brought their suits in state courts, alleging violation of state constitutions. Everywhere they lost, with state courts holding the laws to be legitimate exercises of the police power—the power to make laws to promote the health, safety, and morals of the community.
However, the Louisiana butchers were blessed with outstanding counsel, among them John A. Campbell, former associate justice of the Supreme Court, who had resigned when his state seceded from the Union. Campbell filed a petition in the local state court for an injunction on behalf of the Butchers' Benevolent Association, which operated a slaughterhouse for its members. He asked the court to bar the Crescent City Company from interfering with the association's slaughterhouse business or that of its members. Although Campbell presented arguments similar to those made by butchers in other states, he added the novel claim that the law contravened the Fourteenth Amendment. The new amendment forbade states from enforcing “any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” among which, Campbell argued, was the right to labor freely in an honest avocation.
The issue was taken to the Louisiana Supreme Court in 1870. The butchers' lawyers argued that the law went beyond the inherent powers of legislation and violated both the state constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment, because it deprived them of property rights, not for the good of the community, but for the private gain of monopolists. With only one dissent, the judges rejected the butchers' contention that the law worked such a redistribution of property rights.
The butchers appealed to the Supreme Court, based on their Fourteenth Amendment argument. But in the meantime the Crescent City Company secured state court injunctions against the operation of the association slaughterhouse. Campbell petitioned the United States circuit court to issue an injunction forbidding any interference with butchers' activities until the Supreme Court announced its decision. Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, sitting on circuit, seized the opportunity to offer his view of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Convinced by the legal and business leaders of New Orleans that the law was designed to enrich the incorporators of the Crescent City Company, he ruled that the law was not a legitimate exercise of the police power in Live‐Stock Dealers and Butchers' Association v. Crescent City Live‐Stock Landing and Slaughter‐House Company (1870). In reality the law was designed to confer “a monopoly of a very odious character” (p. 653). Such a law violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Although the framers of the amendment may not have understood the far‐reaching character of the amendment, it nonetheless worked a revolutionary change in the federal system, giving the national government the power to intervene to prevent such deprivations of basic rights. Among the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States was a right to labor, which the Louisiana slaughterhouse law invaded.
Bradley's opinion was important for its articulation of the Fourteenth Amendment rather than for its practical effect. Federal law forbade United States courts from enjoining the action of state courts. Therefore he could only enjoin the Crescent City Company and state officials from bringing new legal actions against the butchers and their association. The state courts enforced the injunctions the company had already obtained.
When the Slaughterhouse Cases reached the Supreme Court in 1873, the justices faced a major dilemma. The Republican party, sustained by the people of the North, had framed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments in a political struggle that turned primarily upon the future place of African‐Americans in American society (see Race and Racism). By ratifying the amendments and sustaining the Republican party, the people had indicated that black Americans should be entitled to the same civil and political rights as white Americans. Moreover, the rhetoric of the debates suggested a vague but general belief that all Americans, white and black, had certain fundamental rights that had been violated in the interest of slavery and that should henceforth be secured against infringement. Yet at the same time Republicans were committed to maintaining the essentials of the federal system. The primary responsibility for governing relationships among Americans and for protecting their rights from infringement by others would remain with the states, they had insisted.
Republicans tried to reconcile the two commitments by framing laws and constitutional amendments that authorized the national government to intervene when the states themselves infringed rights or failed to protect them. Furthermore, those laws and amendments carefully avoided making black Americans the special object of protection. They guaranteed the rights of all Americans equally. But in fact Republicans had not solved the problem, and the Slaughterhouse Cases made the failure clear. It was not an infringement of black people's civil rights or white unionists' freedom of speech that was at issue, but a health regulation not dissimilar from many passed around the nation. If the Supreme Court agreed that the Fourteenth Amendment authorized it to review such legislation, it could expect similar appeals whenever any person believed a police regulation denied basic rights. Moreover, the Court would in effect be recognizing Congress's power to intervene as well, because the fifth section of the Fourteenth Amendment authorized it to pass legislation appropriate for enforcing the other sections. Yet if the Court declined to review such appeals, how could it avoid undermining the guarantees the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to secure?
The court divided dramatically on the issue. A bare majority ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause did not protect such fundamental rights as the right to labor, while four justices trenchantly dissented. Justice Samuel F. Miller delivered the majority opinion. He concluded that “the one pervading purpose” behind the Civil War Amendments was to secure the freedom of black Americans, not to expand or add protections for the rights of whites (p. 71).
In interpreting the Privileges or Immunities Clause, Miller stressed that it barred states from abridging only the “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” Even after the Civil War most Americans continued to make a rigid distinction between those areas where the states had jurisdiction and those areas within the jurisdiction of the national government (see Dual Federalism). Miller turned to this distinction to limit the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. The term “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” was meant to differentiate between those rights associated with state citizenship and those associated with United States citizenship, he insisted. The Fourteenth Amendment forbade states only from abridging the latter.
Since the foundation of the Union the states had been conceded to have final authority over such basic rights as the right to labor, Miller said. With that right, the Fourteenth Amendment had nothing to do. To hold otherwise, Miller explained, would make “this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the states, on the civil rights of their own citizens,” authorized to nullify any law it believed violated those rights (p. 78). Moreover, Congress would have the same right to intervene. With some justification, Miller argued that the American people had no such understanding of the amendment when they discussed and ratified it.
The four dissenting justices wrote three different opinions, although they all joined in that prepared by Justice Stephen J. Field. They denied that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to secure the rights of black Americans alone. They insisted that the right to labor was among the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States. Justices Bradley and Noah Swayne also insisted that Louisiana's regulation deprived the butchers of property without due process of law, another of the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibitions.
The Slaughterhouse Cases are generally assessed within the context of Reconstruction and the efforts to secure national protection for citizens' rights. They have been heavily criticized by scholars, who argue that Miller artificially narrowed the scope of the Privileges or Immunities Clause. Not only did he impose a distinction between the rights of state and national citizenship that had not been in the minds of the framers, but the language of the opinion implied that the rights of national citizenship were few. Some scholars and twentieth‐century Supreme Court justices have argued that the privileges and immunities of the citizens of the United States included at least those listed in the Bill of Rights.
Critics complain that the Slaughterhouse decision severely undermined the ability of the government to protect the rights of the freedmen. There is ample evidence indicating that the decisions did in fact have that effect. Those who opposed national action to protect the rights of African‐American citizens in the 1870s pointed to it to justify their position.
On the other hand, the cases did not involve the rights of black Louisianans. The points at issue were more similar to property rights cases of later years than to the noneconomic civil liberty cases of Reconstruction. From that perspective Miller's opinion may be seen as an articulation of judicial restraint in economic cases rather than an abdication of responsibility to protect human rights. Ultimately the Supreme Court did overturn state regulations affecting the rights Miller placed within state jurisdiction, by holding them among the liberties and property rights that states could not infringe “without due process of law.” Many scholars have perceived a direct line of descent between these decisions and the Slaughterhouse dissents.
See also Due Process, Substantive; Federalism; Privileges and Immunities; Property Rights; State Sovereignty and States' Rights.
Bibliography
- Michael Les Benedict, Preserving Federalism: Reconstruction and the Waite Court,
Supreme Court Review 1978: 39–79. - Loren Beth, The Slaughter‐House Cases—Revisited,
Louisiana Law Review 23 (April 1963): 587–605. - Charles Fairman,
History of the Supreme Court , vol.6 ,Reconstruction and Reunion, 1864–1888, Part One (1971). - Robert Kaczorowski,
The Politics of Judicial Interpretation: The Federal Courts, Department of Justice and Civil Rights, 1866–1876 (1985)
— Michael Les Benedict
