Slaughter-House Cases - Resolution By The Court

Resolution By The Court

In a 5-4 decision issued on April 14, 1873, by Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, 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.

“We do not conceal from ourselves the great responsibility which this duty devolves upon us. No questions so far reaching and pervading in their consequences, so profoundly interesting to the people of this country, and so important in their bearing upon the relations of the United States and of the several States to each other, and to the citizens of the states and of the United States, have been before this court during the official life of any of its present members. We have given every opportunity for a full hearing at the bar; we have discussed it freely and compared views among ourselves; we have taken ample time for careful deliberation, and we now propose to announce the judgments which we have formed in the construction of those articles, so far as we have found them necessary to the decision of the cases before us, and beyond that we have neither the inclination nor the right to go.” —Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 67 (1873)

And,

"The next observation is more important in view of the arguments of counsel in the present case. It is, that the distinction between citizenship of the United States and citizenship of a state is clearly recognized and established. . . .

It is quite clear, then, that there is a citizenship of the United States, and a citizenship of a state, which are distinct from each other, and which depend upon different characteristics or circumstances in the individual.

We think this distinction and its explicit recognition in this Amendment of great weight in this argument, because the next paragraph of this same section, which is the one mainly relied on by the plaintiffs in error, speaks only of privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, and does not speak of those of citizens of the several states. The argument, however, in favor of the plaintiffs, rests wholly on the assumption that the citizenship is the same and the privileges and immunities guaranteed by the clause are the same.” —Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 73-74 (1873)

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

"Was it the purpose of the fourteenth amendment, by the simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned, from the States to the Federal government? And where it is declared that Congress Shall have the power to enforce that article, was it intended to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States?

All this and more must follow if the proposition of the plaintiffs in error be sound.... he effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character....

We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments, nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified them." —Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 77-78 (1873)

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.