Slaughterhouse Cases
Encyclopedia
The Slaughter-House Cases, were the first United States Supreme Court
interpretation of the relatively new Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution
. It is viewed as a pivotal case in early civil rights
law, reading the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting the "privileges or immunities" conferred by virtue of the federal United States citizenship to all individuals of all states within it, but not those privileges or immunities incident to citizenship of a state.
Properly known as Slaughter-House Cases, the decision consolidated three similar cases:
), dung, blood, and urine were a part of New Orleans' drinking water, which caused cholera
among the population. Between 1832 and 1869, the city of New Orleans suffered eleven cholera
outbreaks.
In response, a New Orleans grand jury recommended that the slaughterhouses be moved south, but since many of the slaughterhouses were outside city limits, the grand jury's recommendations carried no weight. The city then appealed to the state legislature. As a result, in 1869, the Louisiana
legislature passed "An Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans, to Locate the Stock Landings and Slaughter Houses, and to incorporate the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter-House Company," a law that allowed the city of New Orleans
to create a corporation
that centralized all slaughterhouse
operations in the city. At the time, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia all had similar provisions to confine butchers to areas that kept offal
from contaminating the water supply.
The legislature chartered a private corporation, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company to run a "Grand Slaughterhouse" at the southern part of the city opposite of the Mississippi. Crescent City was not to slaughter beef itself, but to act as a franchise
corporation, renting out space to other butchers in the city for a fee under a designated maximum. In addition, the statute granted "sole and exclusive privilege of conducting and carrying on the livestock landing and slaughterhouse business within the limits and privilege granted by the act, and that all such animals shall be landed at the stock landings and slaughtered at the slaughterhouses of the company, and nowhere else. Penalties are enacted for infractions of this provision, and prices fixed for the maximum charges of the company for each steamboat and for each animal landed." This exclusivity would last for a twenty-five year period. All other slaughterhouses would be closed up, forcing butchers to slaughter within the operation set up by Crescent City. The statute forbade Crescent City from favoring one butcher over another by promising harsh penalties for refusal to sell space to any butcher. All animals on the premises would be inspected by an officer appointed by the governor of the state.
Over four hundred members of the Butchers' Benevolent Association joined together to sue to stop Crescent City's takeover of the slaughterhouse industry. In the background of his majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller reiterated the concerns of the butchers:
The lower courts found in favor of Crescent City in all cases. Six cases were appealed to the Supreme Court. The butchers based their claims on the due process
, privileges or immunities
and equal protection clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified by the states only five years before the decision in 1868. Their attorney, former Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell
(who had retired due to his Confederate loyalties), was then involved in a number of cases in New Orleans designed to obstruct Radical Reconstruction. Although the 14th Amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves in the South, the language of Section 1 is not racially limited. Campbell was therefore able to argue for a new, broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment that would allow butchers of any race to "sustain their lives through labor."
, the Court held to a narrow interpretation of the amendment and ruled that it did not restrict the police powers of the state. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities clause
affected only rights of United States citizenship and not state citizenship. Therefore the butchers' Fourteenth Amendment rights had not been violated. At the time, the Court viewed due process in a procedural light rather than substantively
. The Court further held that the amendment was primarily intended to protect former slaves and so could not be broadly applied.
And,
Miller believed that the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment ("All persons born and naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside") differentiated between two citizenships, one of the United States and one of the state. Furthermore, the second sentence forbidding states from making "any law which shall abridge," only applied to federal rights alone. Thus, the "privileges and immunities" clause in the constitution only protected rights guaranteed by the United States, not by individual states. As author Jack Beatty put it, these rights included "access to ports and navigable waterways, the ability to run for federal office, and to be protected while on the high seas...they did not include what we call "civil rights."
Miller argues that if the privileges or immunities clause protected the civil rights of citizens of a state from that state, then the 14th amendment would in essence be granting to the Federal government the power to protect all civil rights that had previously been protected by the states, and that "in the absence of language which expresses such a purpose too clearly to admit of doubt," this was too radical a change to be within the scope of the 14th amendment. He asks
Justice Stephen J. Field later wrote that Miller's opinion effectively rendered the Fourteenth Amendment a "vain and idle enactment."
Field, joined by three other justices, wrote an influential dissent in which he accepted Campbell's reading of the amendment as not confined to protection of freed slaves, but rather as embracing the common law
presumption in favor of an individual right to pursue a legitimate occupation. Field's reading of the due process clause of the amendment would prevail in future cases in which the court read the amendment broadly to protect property interests against hostile state laws.
.
professor Laurence Tribe
writes that “the Slaughter-House Cases incorrectly gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause.” Similarly, Yale law professor Akhil Amar has written “Virtually no serious modern scholar—left, right, and center—thinks that Slaughter-House is a plausible reading of the Fourteenth Amendment
.”
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
interpretation of the relatively new Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...
to the Constitution
United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...
. It is viewed as a pivotal case in early civil rights
Civil rights
Civil and political rights are a class of rights that protect individuals' freedom from unwarranted infringement by governments and private organizations, and ensure one's ability to participate in the civil and political life of the state without discrimination or repression.Civil rights include...
law, reading the Fourteenth Amendment as protecting the "privileges or immunities" conferred by virtue of the federal United States citizenship to all individuals of all states within it, but not those privileges or immunities incident to citizenship of a state.
Properly known as Slaughter-House Cases, the decision consolidated three similar cases:
- The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company
- Paul Esteben, L. Ruch, J. P. Rouede, W. Maylie, S. Firmberg, B. Beaubay, William Fagan, J. D. Broderick, N. Seibel, M. Lannes, J. Gitzinger, J. P. Aycock, D. Verges, The Live-Stock Dealers' and Butchers' Association of New Orleans, and Charles Cavaroc v. The State of Louisiana, ex rel. S. Belden, Attorney-General
- The Butchers' Benevolent Association of New Orleans v. The Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company
History and legal dispute
As one resident put it, New Orleans in the mid-19th century was plagued by "intestines and portions of putrefied animal matter lodged [around the drinking pipes]" coming from local slaughterhouses whenever the tide from the Mississippi river was low. A mile and a half upstream from the city, a thousand butchers gutted over 300,000 animals per year. Animal entrails (known as offalOffal
Offal , also called, especially in the United States, variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by culture and region, but includes most internal organs other than...
), dung, blood, and urine were a part of New Orleans' drinking water, which caused cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
among the population. Between 1832 and 1869, the city of New Orleans suffered eleven cholera
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae. The main symptoms are profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. Transmission occurs primarily by drinking or eating water or food that has been contaminated by the diarrhea of an infected person or the feces...
outbreaks.
In response, a New Orleans grand jury recommended that the slaughterhouses be moved south, but since many of the slaughterhouses were outside city limits, the grand jury's recommendations carried no weight. The city then appealed to the state legislature. As a result, in 1869, the Louisiana
Louisiana
Louisiana is a state located in the southern region of the United States of America. Its capital is Baton Rouge and largest city is New Orleans. Louisiana is the only state in the U.S. with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are local governments equivalent to counties...
legislature passed "An Act to Protect the Health of the City of New Orleans, to Locate the Stock Landings and Slaughter Houses, and to incorporate the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughter-House Company," a law that allowed the city of New Orleans
New Orleans, Louisiana
New Orleans is a major United States port and the largest city and metropolitan area in the state of Louisiana. The New Orleans metropolitan area has a population of 1,235,650 as of 2009, the 46th largest in the USA. The New Orleans – Metairie – Bogalusa combined statistical area has a population...
to create a corporation
Corporation
A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...
that centralized all slaughterhouse
Slaughterhouse
A slaughterhouse or abattoir is a facility where animals are killed for consumption as food products.Approximately 45-50% of the animal can be turned into edible products...
operations in the city. At the time, New York, San Francisco, Boston, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia all had similar provisions to confine butchers to areas that kept offal
Offal
Offal , also called, especially in the United States, variety meats or organ meats, refers to the internal organs and entrails of a butchered animal. The word does not refer to a particular list of edible organs, which varies by culture and region, but includes most internal organs other than...
from contaminating the water supply.
The legislature chartered a private corporation, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company to run a "Grand Slaughterhouse" at the southern part of the city opposite of the Mississippi. Crescent City was not to slaughter beef itself, but to act as a franchise
Franchising
Franchising is the practice of using another firm's successful business model. The word 'franchise' is of anglo-French derivation - from franc- meaning free, and is used both as a noun and as a verb....
corporation, renting out space to other butchers in the city for a fee under a designated maximum. In addition, the statute granted "sole and exclusive privilege of conducting and carrying on the livestock landing and slaughterhouse business within the limits and privilege granted by the act, and that all such animals shall be landed at the stock landings and slaughtered at the slaughterhouses of the company, and nowhere else. Penalties are enacted for infractions of this provision, and prices fixed for the maximum charges of the company for each steamboat and for each animal landed." This exclusivity would last for a twenty-five year period. All other slaughterhouses would be closed up, forcing butchers to slaughter within the operation set up by Crescent City. The statute forbade Crescent City from favoring one butcher over another by promising harsh penalties for refusal to sell space to any butcher. All animals on the premises would be inspected by an officer appointed by the governor of the state.
Over four hundred members of the Butchers' Benevolent Association joined together to sue to stop Crescent City's takeover of the slaughterhouse industry. In the background of his majority opinion, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Freeman Miller reiterated the concerns of the butchers:
This statute is denounced [by the butchers] not only as creating a monopoly and conferring odious and exclusive privileges upon a small number of persons at the expense of the great body of the community of New Orleans, but it is asserted that it deprives a large and meritorious class of citizens -- the whole of the butchers of the city -- of the right to exercise their trade, the business to which they have been trained and on which they depend for the support of themselves and their families, and that the unrestricted exercise of the business of butchering is necessary to the daily subsistence of the population of the city.
Due process
Due process is the legal code that the state must venerate all of the legal rights that are owed to a person under the principle. Due process balances the power of the state law of the land and thus protects individual persons from it...
, privileges or immunities
Privileges or Immunities Clause
The Privileges or Immunities Clause is Amendment XIV, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution. It states:Along with the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, this clause became part of the Constitution on July 9, 1868....
and equal protection clauses in the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified by the states only five years before the decision in 1868. Their attorney, former Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell
John Archibald Campbell
John Archibald Campbell was an American jurist.Campbell was born near Washington, Georgia, to Col. Duncan Greene Campbell...
(who had retired due to his Confederate loyalties), was then involved in a number of cases in New Orleans designed to obstruct Radical Reconstruction. Although the 14th Amendment was passed to protect newly freed slaves in the South, the language of Section 1 is not racially limited. Campbell was therefore able to argue for a new, broad reading of the Fourteenth Amendment that would allow butchers of any race to "sustain their lives through labor."
Resolution by the Court
In a five-four decision issued on April 14, 1873, by Justice Samuel Freeman MillerSamuel Freeman Miller
Samuel Freeman Miller was an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1862–1890. He was a physician and lawyer.-Early life and education:...
, the Court held to a narrow interpretation of the amendment and ruled that it did not restrict the police powers of the state. The Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities clause
Privileges or Immunities Clause
The Privileges or Immunities Clause is Amendment XIV, Section 1, Clause 2 of the United States Constitution. It states:Along with the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment, this clause became part of the Constitution on July 9, 1868....
affected only rights of United States citizenship and not state citizenship. Therefore the butchers' Fourteenth Amendment rights had not been violated. At the time, the Court viewed due process in a procedural light rather than substantively
Substantive due process
Substantive due process is one of the theories of law through which courts enforce limits on legislative and executive powers and authority...
. The Court further held that the amendment was primarily intended to protect former slaves and so could not be broadly applied.
And,
Miller believed that the first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment ("All persons born and naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State where they reside") differentiated between two citizenships, one of the United States and one of the state. Furthermore, the second sentence forbidding states from making "any law which shall abridge," only applied to federal rights alone. Thus, the "privileges and immunities" clause in the constitution only protected rights guaranteed by the United States, not by individual states. As author Jack Beatty put it, these rights included "access to ports and navigable waterways, the ability to run for federal office, and to be protected while on the high seas...they did not include what we call "civil rights."
Miller argues that if the privileges or immunities clause protected the civil rights of citizens of a state from that state, then the 14th amendment would in essence be granting to the Federal government the power to protect all civil rights that had previously been protected by the states, and that "in the absence of language which expresses such a purpose too clearly to admit of doubt," this was too radical a change to be within the scope of the 14th amendment. He asks
Justice Stephen J. Field later wrote that Miller's opinion effectively rendered the Fourteenth Amendment a "vain and idle enactment."
Field, joined by three other justices, wrote an influential dissent in which he accepted Campbell's reading of the amendment as not confined to protection of freed slaves, but rather as embracing the common law
Common law
Common law is law developed by judges through decisions of courts and similar tribunals rather than through legislative statutes or executive branch action...
presumption in favor of an individual right to pursue a legitimate occupation. Field's reading of the due process clause of the amendment would prevail in future cases in which the court read the amendment broadly to protect property interests against hostile state laws.
Subsequent developments
The victory of the Crescent City Company was short-lived, surviving the ruling above by only 11 years. By 1879, the State of Louisiana had adopted a new constitution that prohibited the state's ability to grant slaughterhouse monopolies, devolving regulation of cattle slaughter to the parishes and municipalities, and further banning those subordinate governmental units from granting monopoly rights over such activities. Having essentially lost their monopoly protection, the Crescent City Co. sued. That case ended in Butchers' Union Co. v. Crescent City Co. (1884), with the U.S. Supreme Court holding that Crescent City Co. did not have a contract with the state, and that revocation of the monopoly privilege was not a violation of the Contract ClauseContract Clause
The Contract Clause appears in the United States Constitution, Article I, section 10, clause 1. It states:The Contract Clause prohibits states from enacting any law that retroactively impairs contract rights...
.
Criticism
Harvard lawHarvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
professor Laurence Tribe
Laurence Tribe
Laurence Henry Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. He also works with the firm Massey & Gail LLP on a variety of matters....
writes that “the Slaughter-House Cases incorrectly gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause.” Similarly, Yale law professor Akhil Amar has written “Virtually no serious modern scholar—left, right, and center—thinks that Slaughter-House is a plausible reading of the Fourteenth Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was adopted on July 9, 1868, as one of the Reconstruction Amendments.Its Citizenship Clause provides a broad definition of citizenship that overruled the Dred Scott v...
.”
Further reading
- Akhil R. Amar, Foreword: The Document and the Doctrine, 114 HARV. L. REV. 26, 123 n.327 (2000).
- Lurie, Jonathan, and Labbe, Ronald. Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment. Wichita, Kan." University Press of Kansas, 2003. ISBN 0700612904
- Ross, Michael A. "Obstructing Reconstruction: John Archibald Campbell and the Legal Campaign Against Louisiana's Republican Government, 1868-1873." Civil War History. 49:3 (September 2003), 235-253.
- Ross, Michael A. "Justice Miller's Reconstruction: The Slaughter-House Cases, Health Codes, and Civil Rights in New Orleans, 1861-1873." Journal of Southern History. 64:4 (November 1998), 649-676.
- Ross, Michael A. Justice of Shattered Dreams: Samuel Freeman Miller and the Supreme Court During the Civil War Era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. ISBN 0807129240