:The Slaughterhouse Cases: Regulation, Reconstruction, and the Fourteenth Amendment

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Justice Felix Frankfurter has observed that Supreme Court decisions present “windows on the world” (p. 244). The Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) strikingly illustrates the accuracy of Frankfurter's comment. Ronald M. Labbé and Jonathan Lurie's book explores the Court's precedent-setting construction of the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment within the context of New Orleans' efforts to implement effective public health and sanitation regulation of the slaughtering business amid racially charged and corruption-ridden political confrontations during Louisiana's Republican Reconstruction. Like contemporaries, some historians emphasized the legitimacy of the public health issues against the record of political perfidy. Others focused on the restrictive interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment's privileges and immunities clause, which gutted federal protection of individual rights and enabled the South's suppression of the rights of African Americans. Labbé and Lurie contribute useful insight to each of these perspectives. The facts of the Slaughterhouse Cases obscured white Democrat's antagonism toward African-American enfranchisement, which permeated Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. In 1869, Republican governor Henry C. Warmouth signed an incorporation statute creating the Crescent City Live Stock Landings and Slaughterhouse Company. In order to “protect the Health of the City of New Orleans” (p. 253), the statute conferred upon the company the sole right to locate live stock landing and slaughter operations at a point on the Mississippi River below the city's water works. Labbé and Lurie show that relocation of the slaughtering business was a vital health and sanitation measure in an era before refrigeration technology transformed the industry. They demonstrate, too, that the company's monopoly did not limit the right to operate the business except to require, in return for a modest fee, that it be located in the company's facilities. Critics nonetheless railed against a pernicious monopoly.