The Slaughter-House Cases were an 1873 Supreme Court decision that, by a 5–4 vote, upheld a Louisiana law giving one company an exclusive right to operate slaughterhouses in and around New Orleans. In the process, the Court gave its first interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and read the Privileges or Immunities Clause so narrowly that it has done almost no work protecting individual rights ever since. The dispute itself was about butchers and a state-created monopoly, but the ruling shaped how federal and state citizenship, civil rights, and the Reconstruction Amendments would be understood for more than a century.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
The Louisiana Law Behind the Case
On March 8, 1869, Louisiana granted the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company a 25-year exclusive privilege to handle all butchering in the parishes of Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard, an area that included the entire city of New Orleans and several hundred thousand residents.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
Every butcher in that territory had to bring livestock to the company’s facility and pay set fees per animal. No one could run an independent slaughterhouse, maintain a separate livestock landing, or hold cattle for sale outside the company’s yards. Hundreds of independent butchers who had run their own operations were suddenly forced to work at a single state-designated site.
What the Butchers Argued
The butchers were represented by John A. Campbell, a former Supreme Court justice who had resigned in 1861 to serve the Confederacy and returned to private practice in Louisiana after the war.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Justice John Archibald Campbell
Their constitutional attack was broad. They argued that being compelled to work at a private company’s facility amounted to involuntary servitude under the Thirteenth Amendment. They also claimed the monopoly violated the Fourteenth Amendment in three ways: it stripped them of the privileges or immunities of citizenship, denied them equal protection of the laws, and deprived them of liberty and property without due process.3Oyez. Slaughter-House Cases At bottom, they argued that any free citizen should be able to pursue a lawful trade without being conscripted into a state-created monopoly.
The Supreme Court’s Decision
Justice Samuel Miller wrote for the five-justice majority and focused almost entirely on the Privileges or Immunities Clause. His opinion drew a sharp textual line between “citizens of the United States” and citizens “of the State wherein they reside,” treating these as two distinct categories, each with its own set of rights.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
Under this dual-citizenship framework, the Privileges or Immunities Clause protected only rights tied to national citizenship: access to federal offices, use of navigable waterways, protection on the high seas, the right to travel to the seat of government. Miller himself acknowledged the list was narrow. The everyday rights people actually cared about, including the right to earn a living, own property, make contracts, and receive police protection, belonged to state citizenship and were left where they had always been, under state control.
Miller warned that the alternative reading would turn the Supreme Court into “a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States” on civil rights, a shift he did not believe Congress had intended when it drafted the amendment.
Public Health and the Police Power
The majority also upheld the Louisiana law as a legitimate exercise of the state’s police power. Urban slaughterhouses in the nineteenth century were genuinely dangerous. Blood, offal, and animal waste fouled water supplies, and New Orleans, which drew its water from a Mississippi River that sat downstream of dozens of unregulated slaughterhouses, had lived through cholera and yellow fever outbreaks.4Louisiana State University Law Center. Slaughter-House Cases Consolidating slaughter at a single regulated site downriver of the city’s water intakes was, in the Court’s view, a reasonable public health measure, and the fact that it burdened some butchers’ economic freedom did not make it unconstitutional.
The Dissents
Four justices dissented, and their reasoning proved far more influential over time than the majority’s.
Justice Stephen Field, joined by Chief Justice Salmon Chase and Justices Noah Swayne and Joseph Bradley, wrote the principal dissent. Field argued that Miller’s reading drained the Privileges or Immunities Clause of any meaning. If it protected only a handful of rights that were already secured before the Fourteenth Amendment existed, the clause was doing no work at all. Field insisted the amendment was meant to protect the fundamental rights of all citizens, including the right to pursue a lawful trade free of state-granted monopolies.1Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1872)
Justice Bradley wrote separately to press the Due Process argument the majority had set aside. Tracing the right to follow a lawful occupation back to the Magna Carta, he called it “one of his most valuable rights, and one which the legislature of a State cannot invade.” His opinion planted the seed for what later became substantive due process, the idea that certain rights are so fundamental no state procedure can take them away.5C-SPAN. The Slaughter-House Cases – Bradley Dissent
Effect on Civil Rights After the Civil War
The case’s deepest damage had nothing to do with butchers. By reading the Privileges or Immunities Clause so narrowly, the Court removed what should have been the primary constitutional tool for challenging state-level racial oppression. The Fourteenth Amendment had been written specifically to stop Southern states from imposing, in the Court’s own words, “onerous disabilities and burdens” on Black citizens “to such an extent that their freedom was of little value.”6National Archives. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) Miller’s framework left enforcement of most civil rights to the very state governments most likely to deny them.
Three years later, in United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Court extended the Slaughter-House framework to hold that rights listed in the Bill of Rights, including the rights to peaceable assembly and to bear arms, were not privileges or immunities of national citizenship and so could not be enforced by Congress against the states. Cruikshank arose from the Colfax Massacre, in which a white mob killed dozens of Black citizens in Louisiana, and the ruling made federal prosecution of that violence nearly impossible. Together, Slaughter-House and Cruikshank helped set the constitutional stage for the Jim Crow era and the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson.
What Happened to the Monopoly
The Crescent City company did not serve out its 25-year charter. Louisiana adopted a new state constitution in 1879 that abolished monopoly privileges outright and separately voided “the monopoly features in the charter of any corporation now existing in the State.”7Law Library of Louisiana. The Slaughterhouse Cases – Epilogue
The company sued, arguing its charter was a contract the state could not revoke. In Butchers’ Union Co. v. Crescent City Co. (1884), the Supreme Court ruled against the monopoly, holding that a legislature cannot enter a contract that ties the hands of future legislatures on matters of public health. The same police power that justified creating the monopoly in 1873 also allowed the state to dismantle it.8Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Butchers’ Union Co. v. Crescent City Co.
The Lasting Legacy
The Privileges or Immunities Clause has remained largely inert since 1873. The rights it was arguably meant to protect did not disappear, though. They migrated to the Due Process Clause, which the Court gradually used to apply fundamental rights against the states.9Congress.gov. Fourteenth Amendment
That workaround, known as selective incorporation, developed case by case through the twentieth century. Rather than applying the whole Bill of Rights to the states at once, the Court asked whether each particular right was fundamental to the nation’s scheme of ordered liberty or deeply rooted in the country’s history and tradition. Nearly every provision of the Bill of Rights, from free speech to the right against unreasonable searches to the right to counsel, was eventually applied to the states through this route.
The Privileges or Immunities Clause itself has surfaced only occasionally. In Saenz v. Roe (1999), the Court used it to strike down a California law that limited welfare benefits for new residents, holding that the right to travel includes the right to equal treatment on moving to a new state.10Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Saenz v. Roe In McDonald v. Chicago (2010), Justice Clarence Thomas argued in concurrence that the Second Amendment should be incorporated against the states through the Privileges or Immunities Clause, but the majority declined to revive it. Justice Alito wrote that the question had been “long since decided” by the Slaughter-House Cases.11Oyez. McDonald v. Chicago
The Slaughter-House Cases remain good law. The dual-citizenship framework has never been formally overruled. What changed is that the Court found another way to reach many of the same results, through a clause the 1873 majority barely discussed.