Slaughter-House Cases - History and Legal Dispute

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 " 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 offal), 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:

This statute is denounced 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.

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."