Launchpad Republic

6The Evolution from Small Business to Big

The stench was so bad it could be smelled throughout New Orleans. More important, the offal from butchered animals was contaminating the water supply and sickening residents. To remedy this chaotic situation, the Louisiana legislature in 1869 gave the newly chartered Crescent City Livestock Landing and Slaughterhouse Company an exclusive right to operate a single meatpacking plant. The facility was to be located just south of New Orleans, across the Mississippi and downstream from the main population area. It had the right to operate for a 25‐year period and to charge butchers to use wharves and other facilities.

In response, a group of 400 long‐standing independent butchers sued to stop the monopoly. Arguing that the legislation conferred an “odious and exclusive privilege” to the new company, the butchers claimed that it deprived them of their livelihood. Undercurrents of racism and scars from the Civil War were at play, as many of the (white) butchers felt that the new facility would help newly freed Blacks and northern carpetbaggers at their expense. With more than a bit of irony, the attorney for the butchers used the recently enacted 14th Amendment, intended to protect the freedmen, to claim that their rights were being violated.

In ruling against the butchers in the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), the U.S. Supreme Court narrowly interpreted the 14th Amendment, specifically the “privileges and immunities” provision. The majority ...