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The Slaughterhouse Cases

Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment

Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie

November 2003
328 pages, 12 illustrations, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1290-1, $34.95

WINNER OF THE SCRIBES AWARD
given by the American Society of Writers on Legal Subjects

book cover imageThe 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. When it did, it 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 neighboring backwaters. When Louisiana authorized a monopoly slaughterhouse to bring about sanitation reform, many 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 slim 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.” Of much greater import, however, was Miller’s finding 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 “privileges and immunities,” “due process,” and “equal protection” clauses of the new amendment. The Court refused to allow the broad terms of a single amendment to alter the existing balance of power between the states and the federal government.

In striking contrast, the minority, led by Justice Stephen Field, claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment had been intended to apply to all Americans, not just former slaves. In particular, it guaranteed the New Orleans butchers a right to equal treatment in the exercise of the police power.

Engagingly written and insightfully argued, the book provides the most complete analysis yet of this controversial Supreme Court decision, fills a major gap in American history, law, and politics, and sets the standard for all future discussions on the subject.

“Labbe and Lurie have painted, with graceful style, a magnificent panorama of a key episode of nineteenth-century legal history. . . . From their vivid description of the public health hazards afflicting nineteenth-century New Orleans to their superb chapter surveying the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Chase, this is compellingly readable history.”—Journal of American History

“The authors have done a remarkable job unraveling the complex threads of this intriguing legal history.”—Louisiana History

“An outstanding book, deeply researched and beautifully written. The authors examine with great skill and care the social and political background, and the legal implications, of one of the pivotal cases of American constitutional history. In every way this is a vivid, intriguing, illuminating case study: a model for work of this kind.”--Lawrence M. Friedman, author of A History of American Law

“Just about everyone who studies the Fourteenth Amendment addresses the Slaughterhouse Cases, but this is the first book to focus so completely on the case itself. . . . An excellent book that fills a significant gap.”--Paul Kens, author of Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial

“A superb work that tells a lively and compelling story.”--Herbert Hovenkamp, author of Enterprise and American Law, 1836–1937

RONALD M. LABBÉ is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and has written extensively on Louisiana law and politics. JONATHAN LURIE is professor of history and adjunct professor of law at Rutgers University and author of Military Justice in America, 1775–1980.