The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment?Abridged Edition

by Ronald M. Labbé, Jonathan Lurie

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, sought to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves; but its first important test did not arise until five years later. That test centered on a vitriolic dispute among the white butchers of mid-Reconstruction New Orleans.

The rough-and-tumble world of nineteenth-century New Orleans was a sanitation nightmare, with the city's slaughterhouses dumping animal remains into local backwaters. When Louisiana authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, many independent butchers felt disenfranchised. Framing their case as an infringement of rights protected by the new amendment, they flooded the lower courts with nearly 300 suits. The surviving cases that reached the U.S. Supreme Court pitted the butchers' right to labor against the state's "police power" to regulate public health. The result was a controversial decision that for the first time addressed the meaning and import of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Speaking for the majority in the Court's 5-4 decision, Justice Samuel F. Miller upheld the state's actions as a fair use of its "police power." He also argued that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended exclusively as a means of protecting and redressing the suffering of former slaves. The result was a very restricted interpretation of the amendment's "privileges and immunities," "due process," and "equal protection" clauses. In striking contrast, the minority, led by Justices Stephen Field and Joseph Bradley, claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment had been intended to apply to all Americans, not just former slaves, and therefore protected the butchers' right to labor in their chosen profession.

Engagingly written and concisely crafted for students and general readers, this newly abridged edition provides a very accessible guide to one of the Supreme Court's most famous cases.

224 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Slaughterhouse cases, decided by the Supreme Court in 1873, are usually ranked among the top five or so most important U.S. legal decisions of all time, up there with Marbury vs. Madison and Brown v. Board, but few people know the intricate and detailed background to the them. This book fills in the gaps and offers some truly original interpretations of the epic fight.

The usual story is that the 5 to 4 decision in Slaughterhouse gutted the 14th Amendment, especially its "privileges and immunities" clause, and thus left the federal government impotent to protect African-Americans and others in South against the ravages of state governments intent on subverting civil and constitutional rights. The authors offer some important twists on this story.

The privileges that the Louisiana state government were said to be subverting in this case were the rights of independent butchers in New Orleans to practice their craft outside of a private slaughterhouse, which had been granted a monopoly by the state government. The authors, though, go into what can only be called excessive detail to show the horrid state of public health in the city before this monopoly, and the desperate need for some regulation of slaughterhouse effluvia, which was often dumped on the banks of the Mississippi or into the river right above the waterworks. When Dr. J.C. Simmonds broke the local code of silence in 1851 and advertised that New Orleans did truly have mortality rates about twice those of most other big cities (about 4.2% per year), many fingered the farrago of unregulated slaughterhouses, and thus a move to centralize them, such as had been done recently in London and Paris, began. Yet it was only with the creation of a Reconstruction government and legislature in 1868, composed of about 1/3 African-Americans, that reform became possible and the new centralized slaughterhouse was created. Thus the greatest irony highlighted in the book is that the case that supposedly removed federal protections from African-Americans was actually arguing against the most racially liberal government in Louisiana's history, and its attempts to reform public health. In another irony the lawyer working to uphold the 14th amendment's privileges against the state government was John Campbell, the former Supreme Court Justice who had retired to become a Confederate Assistant Secretary of War.

The authors do provide abundant evidence that the franchise for the monopoly was obtained by rampant bribery, but point out that the costs it could charge butchers who practiced there (and they were forced to allow outside butchers to practice there) were tightly regulated by law. Furthermore, the monopoly fell easily into the contemporary understanding of the "police power" of the states, which gave them wide latitude to legislate on issues of public health. A similar limitation on slaughterhouse locations had just been upheld in the state of New York (though one was also just struck down by state courts in Chicago).

The book perhaps leans too heavily on Justice Samuel Miller's previous profession as a doctor to argue that the author of the decision was only concerned with the health effects of the law, and pushes too far its argument that the very limited number of cited "privileges" in his opinion were only extraneous "dictum." Yet it does make a fair argument that the truly malevolent explanations of the decision are misplaced. I would argue with some of the more benevolent interpretations of the slaughterhouse monopoly itself than the authors provide, and would have perhaps liked to have limited their excessive recitations of detail, but this book can't help but reshape how one thinks of such disparate fields as public health, law, and racial justice during the Reconstruction era.