In the slaughter-house cases, the supreme court held that the fourteenth amendment

Louisiana passed a law that restricted slaughterhouse operations in New Orleans to a single corporation. Pursuant to the law, the Crescent City Live-stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company received a charter to run a slaughterhouse downstream from the city. No other areas around the city were permitted for slaughtering animals over the next 25 years, and existing slaughterhouses would be closed. A group of butchers argued that they would lose their right to practice their trade and earn a livelihood under the monopoly. Specifically, they argued the monopoly created involuntary servitude in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment, and abridged privileges or immunities, denied equal protection of the laws, and deprived them of liberty and property without due process of law in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Conclusions
Principles of State Constitutional Interpretation
2019 National Student Symposium
Description
Source-Dependent Questions
Question Relating to Excerpt, Paragraphs 1-7
Questions Relating to Excerpt, Paragraphs 8-11
Questions Relating to Excerpt, Paragraphs 12-15
Citation Information
How did the Slaughterhouse Cases affect the 14th Amendment?
How did the Supreme Court interpret the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases?
Which clause of the 14th Amendment was made less meaningful as a result of the Slaughterhouse Cases?
What Supreme Court cases used the 14th Amendment?

Questions

Did the creation of the monopoly violate the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments?

Conclusions

The Court held that the monopoly violated neither the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments, reasoning that these amendments were passed with the narrow intent to grant full equality to former slaves. Thus, to the Court, the Fourteenth Amendment only banned the states from depriving blacks of equal rights; it did not guarantee that all citizens, regardless of race, should receive equal economic privileges by the state. Any rights guaranteed by the Privileges or Immunities Clause were limited to areas controlled by the federal government, such as access to ports and waterways, the right to run for federal office, and certain rights affecting safety on the seas. Moreover, the Court held that the butchers bringing suit were not deprived of their property without due process of law because they could still earn a legal living in the area by slaughtering on the Crescent City Company grounds. Thus, the Court concluded that the Louisiana law was constitutional.
Justice Stephen Johnson Field’s dissent argued that the Fourteenth Amendment could not be construed as only protecting former slaves. Rather, he believed that it incorporated strands of common-law doctrine and needed to be interpreted outside the Civil War context. This position would later become widely accepted.

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Courtesy of Library of Congress, Miller, Samuel Freeman, "U.S. Reports: Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873)," 1872

Description

In March 1869, the Louisiana state legislature enacted a law granting a monopoly to the Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughterhouse Company to slaughter animals in the New Orleans area. The goal was to eliminate the waste runoff that collected in the city from slaughterhouses upstream the Mississippi River. Although all slaughterhouses were banned from operating in the area, independent butchers could still slaughter animals on the company's grounds for a fee. A group of local butchers sued, arguing that the law violated Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, most notably the amendment's Privileges and Immunities Clause. With this case, the U.S. Supreme Court was tasked with interpreting the recently ratified 14th Amendment for the first time. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled against the butchers by rejecting what would eventually become the doctrine of incorporation of the Bill of Rights. Instead, the Court argued that the 14th Amendment textually distinguished between citizens of the United States and citizens of the several states, which mattered because the Privileges and Immunities Clause that followed protected the privileges or immunities of national citizenship from interference by state action. However, the clause did not forbid the states from withholding the privileges and immunities that belonged to state citizenship. Through this narrow interpretation of the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court essentially ruled that the federal government did not have broad power to enforce civil rights, believing that to do so would infringe on a power that had always and needed to continue to belong to the individual states in a federal system of government.

Full Transcript of U.S. Supreme Court: Slaughterhouse Cases

Transcribed Excerpts from U.S. Supreme Court: Slaughterhouse Cases

Source-Dependent Questions

Question Relating to Excerpt, Paragraphs 1-7

How did the Supreme Court interpret the first clause of the 14th Amendment (the Citizenship Clause)? How is it possible that a person can have two types of citizenship?

Questions Relating to Excerpt, Paragraphs 8-11

How did the Supreme Court interpret the second clause of the 14th Amendment (the Privileges and Immunities Clause)? Consider the emphasis the Supreme Court placed on the wording of this clause.
What did the Supreme Court mean when it argued that "it is only the former which are placed by this clause under the protection of the Federal Constitution, and that the latter, whatever they may be, are not intended to have any additional protection by this paragraph of the amendment?" Consider what type of privileges and immunities the 14th Amendment does and does not protect.

Questions Relating to Excerpt, Paragraphs 12-15

According to the Supreme Court's ruling, what was not the purpose of the 14th Amendment?
This decision was made by the Supreme Court in the midst of Radical Republican Reconstruction of the South. When Reconstruction eventually ends, how might this interpretation of the Privileges and Immunities Clause and the powers of the state and national governments affect African American civil rights in the South?

Citation Information

Miller, Samuel Freeman, "U.S. Reports: Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873)," 1872. Courtesy of Library of Congress

How did the Slaughterhouse Cases affect the 14th Amendment?

The Slaughterhouse Cases, resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1873, ruled that a citizen's "privileges and immunities," as protected by the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment against the states, were limited to those spelled out in the Constitution and did not include many rights given by the individual states.

How did the Supreme Court interpret the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases?

majority opinion by Samuel F. Miller. The Court held that the monopoly violated neither the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Amendments, reasoning that these amendments were passed with the narrow intent to grant full equality to former slaves.

Which clause of the 14th Amendment was made less meaningful as a result of the Slaughterhouse Cases?

Justice Miller is infamous for his decision in Slaughterhouse because his decision effectively blotted out an entire clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; The Privileges or Immunities Clause. This clause, scholars speculate, could have secured civil rights enumerated under the Bill of Rights, for African Americans.