The Slaughter-House Cases, decided by the Supreme Court in 1873, created a problem that has shaped American constitutional law for over 150 years: they effectively gutted the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, stripping it of nearly all meaning. By splitting citizenship into two tiers and leaving most fundamental rights under state control, the ruling severely weakened the federal government’s ability to protect individual liberties, particularly those of formerly enslaved people during Reconstruction.
What the Case Was About
In 1869, the Louisiana state legislature granted a single company, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company, an exclusive monopoly over the slaughtering business in New Orleans. The state justified the law on public health grounds. Independent butchers who were shut out of their livelihood sued, arguing that the monopoly violated their rights under the newly ratified Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The butchers claimed the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause protected their right to earn a living free from arbitrary state-granted monopolies.
The case reached the Supreme Court, which ruled 5 to 4 against the butchers. The majority upheld the Louisiana monopoly and, in doing so, interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment so narrowly that its most promising clause became nearly useless for decades.
The Two-Tier Citizenship Problem
The core problem created by the ruling was the Court’s invention of a sharp divide between national citizenship and state citizenship. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Miller held that people held two separate sets of rights: one set belonging to them as citizens of the United States, and another belonging to them as citizens of their individual state. The Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, he concluded, only protected the narrow federal set.
What fell into the federal category? A thin collection of rights that already depended on the national government for their existence: the right to travel to the seat of government, access to federal offices, protection on the high seas, and a handful of guarantees already spelled out in the Constitution, like protection against bills of attainder and ex post facto laws. Nearly everything else, including the right to earn a living, own property, make contracts, and access the courts, was classified as a privilege of state citizenship. That meant states had almost exclusive authority to define, grant, or restrict those rights as they saw fit, with no federal oversight through the Fourteenth Amendment.
The practical effect was enormous. The Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified just five years earlier, in large part to ensure that the federal government could protect the civil rights of formerly enslaved people against hostile state governments. The Slaughter-House ruling told those same state governments that the amendment barely touched their authority over civil rights.
Undermining Reconstruction and Civil Rights
The most damaging consequence played out across the South in the years following the decision. The Fourteenth Amendment was one of three Reconstruction Amendments designed to secure freedom and equality for Black Americans after the Civil War. By ruling that the amendment did not transfer broad civil rights protections to the federal government, the Court insulated states from federal review of their laws. Justice Miller wrote that the amendment did not contain a “legislative purpose to destroy the general features of the federal system,” and that regulating civil rights and protecting person and property remained state functions.
This created a legal framework that Southern states exploited for generations. If fundamental rights like voting access, property ownership, and equal treatment in courts were state matters beyond federal reach, then states could restrict those rights with little constitutional accountability. The Slaughter-House decision laid the groundwork for later rulings, like United States v. Cruikshank in 1876, which further limited federal power to prosecute violence against Black citizens. Together, these cases helped dismantle Reconstruction-era protections and paved the way for Jim Crow laws that would persist into the twentieth century.
What the Dissenters Warned
The four dissenting justices recognized the problem immediately. Justice Stephen Field argued that the Fourteenth Amendment could not be read as protecting only formerly enslaved people in a narrow sense. He believed the amendment incorporated broad common-law protections, including the right to pursue a lawful occupation, and that it needed to be interpreted as a general guarantee of individual liberty rather than confined to its Civil War origins. Field warned that the majority’s reading drained the Privileges or Immunities Clause of any real substance.
His position was largely vindicated over time. Legal scholars and later justices came to view the Slaughter-House majority opinion as one of the most consequential errors in Supreme Court history, a ruling that crippled the very constitutional provision designed to be the primary shield for individual rights against state overreach.
The Workaround Through Due Process
Because the Privileges or Immunities Clause was rendered nearly meaningless after Slaughter-House, the Supreme Court eventually had to find another path to protect fundamental rights against state governments. That path became the Due Process Clause of the same Fourteenth Amendment. Over the following decades, the Court developed the doctrine of “incorporation,” using due process to apply the Bill of Rights to the states one provision at a time: free speech, the right to counsel, protection against unreasonable searches, and so on.
This workaround solved the practical problem but created its own legal awkwardness. Many scholars argue that the Privileges or Immunities Clause was originally intended to do exactly this job. Instead, the Court built an elaborate due process framework to accomplish what a straightforward reading of the Privileges or Immunities Clause would have achieved directly.
Why It Still Matters Today
The Slaughter-House precedent has never been overturned. As recently as 2010, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Supreme Court was asked to reconsider it. The petitioners in that case argued that the right to keep and bear arms should be protected against state laws through the Privileges or Immunities Clause, and that the Court should finally reject the narrow Slaughter-House interpretation. The majority declined, writing that the question of rights protected against state infringement had been analyzed under the Due Process Clause for “many decades” and that there was no need to disturb the Slaughter-House holding.
Justice Clarence Thomas, however, wrote separately to argue for exactly that. He contended that the right to bear arms was enforceable against the states because it was a privilege of American citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment’s original meaning. He explicitly rejected the Slaughter-House interpretation insofar as it prevented any overlap between the privileges of state and federal citizenship.
The debate reflects a tension that has persisted since 1873. The Slaughter-House Cases created a constitutional dead zone where the Privileges or Immunities Clause sits largely dormant, its intended role absorbed by other legal doctrines. Whether the Court will ever fully revive the clause remains an open question, but the problems the ruling created, from weakened civil rights protections during Reconstruction to a convoluted modern framework for applying the Bill of Rights to the states, continue to shape American law.