SLAUGHTERHOUSE CASES

The Slaughterhouse Cases, a consolidation of multiple lawsuits, argued that because of a Louisiana law forming a sanctioned corporate monopoly over the butchering trade, individual butchers would lose their right to practice their profession and earn a living as citizens. Argued February 3–5, 1873, and decided April 14, 1873, the decision rendered in the Slaughterhouse Cases is a unique example of a single U.S. Supreme Court decision that effectively reversed the political and popular will of the drafters of the amendment. The decision came just five years after ratification and less than a decade after the beginning of the American Civil War. Unlike the Constitution itself or many of its amendments, the intended meaning of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were well known in 1873. Most, if not all, of the framers of these clauses and protections were alive and still very much part of the nation's political life. The Slaughterhouse decision argued that there was a fundamental difference between being a citizen of a state and a citizen of the nation—that everyone held dual citizenship as a citizen of each. Because of this duality, the Fourteenth Amendment's assurance of rights held only to the rights controlled by the federal government, such as those narrowly outlined in Article IV, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. Thus, the extension of rights under such amendments was fundamentally aimed at extending these protections to formerly enslaved people, not to alter states' rights.