Author: Timothy Sandefur
You’ll be hearing a lot in coming months about the Slaughterhouse Cases, given that the Supreme Court is poised to reconsider that decision in McDonald v. Chicago. Slaughterhouse, you’ll recall, is the 1872 decision in which the Supreme Court essentially erased the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause—the provision that the its authors intended to be the primary protection for individual rights under the Amendment.
Although legal scholars now generally agree that Slaughterhouse was wrongly decided, and although many historians have regarded it as the first of the disastrous series of cases in which the Supreme Court backed away from Reconstruction efforts to protect the rights of former slaves in the post-Civil War south, there’s been surprisingly little serious attention devoted to Slaughterhouse by historians. In fact, there’s only one book on the case—Jonathan Lurie and Ronald Labbé’s 2003 book The Slaughterhouse Cases, which I reviewed (very negatively) for the Claremont Review of Books.
Among other things, Labbé and Laure argue that John Campbell, the attorney representing the butchers in the Slaughterhouse Cases, saw the case as an opportunity to attack Reconstruction by publicizing the corruption of the integrated Louisiana legislature. His defense of the butchers was really a sophisticated plan to destroy reconstruction. “His short-range target was, of course, a specific statute. But his long-range objectives, again, were the conditions and circumstances that enabled a Louisiana legislature to convene and enact such offensive legislation in the first place.” It’s certainly plausible that Campbell took the case for this reason, and used it as an vehicle for attacking what he (with much plausibility) saw as a corrupt state legislature.
But on the other hand, Campbell was arguing in favor of enforcing the strong limits on state autonomy created by the Fourteenth Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause: he was arguing in favor of strong federal power to protect civil rights and limit state autocracy! It was the other side—the state of Louisiana—that successfully argued against federal power to protect individual rights in the Reconstruction south. And to make that argument, the state of Louisiana relied on the talents of one of America’s most outspoken enemies of reconstruction: Jeremiah Sullivan Black.
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