Editing Slaughter-House Cases (section)

===Opinion of the Court===
[[File:Samuel Freeman Miller - Brady-Handy.jpg|thumb|right|upright=0.875|Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, the author of the majority opinion in the ''Slaughter-House Cases'']]
Five justices formed the majority and joined an opinion written by justice [[Samuel Freeman Miller]]. Miller framed the Court's opinion around the notion that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were primarily meant to protect former [[Slavery in the United States|black slaves]].{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 541}}
{{blockquote
|text=[O]n the most casual examination of the language of these amendments, no one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in them all, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.
|source=''Slaughter-House Cases'', 83 U.S. at 71.<ref>Quoted in part in {{harvp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 541}}.</ref>
}}

With this view of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments' purposes, the Court interpreted their protections very narrowly.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 541}} First, the Court rejected the butchers' Equal Protection Clause arguments, saying that it "doubt[ed] very much" that the clause would ever prohibit anything other than state laws discriminating against black people as a class.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 541}} Next, the Court rejected the butchers' Due Process Clause arguments, saying that "under no construction of [the Due Process Clause] that we have ever seen, or any that we deem admissible", could the state's restrictions on the butchers' work constitute a "deprivation of property" under the Due Process Clause.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 541}}

The Court then turned to the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which it viewed just as narrowly as it had the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, pp. 541–42}} The Court held that protecting people from state government actions was not the Privileges or Immunities Clause's purpose, and that the clause was never meant to be a basis on which courts could strike down state laws.{{sfnp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 542}} 
{{Blockquote|
[S]uch a construction [of the Privileges or Immunities Clause] followed by the reversal of the judgments of the Supreme Court of Louisiana in these cases, would constitute this court a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the States, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve as consistent with those rights, as they existed at the time of the adoption of this amendment. ...

We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments, nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified them.
|source=''Slaughter-House Cases'', 83 U.S. at 78.<ref>Quoted in part in {{harvp|Chemerinsky|2019|loc=§&nbsp;6.3.2, p. 542}}.</ref>
}}
Having adopted this narrow interpretation, the Court ruled that the Privileges or Immunities Clause only protects rights that pertain to federal U.S. citizenship, not state citizenship.{{sfnp|Nowak|Rotunda|2012|loc=§&nbsp;14.3(b)}} This interpretation meant that the Privileges or Immunities Clause did not protect Americans' broad rights as citizens of their individual states, which Miller said "embrace[d] nearly every civil right for the establishment and protection of which organized government is instituted".<ref>''Slaughter-House Cases'', 83 U.S. at 76, quoted in {{harvp|Tribe|2000|p=1305}}.</ref>

The Court derived this state-federal citizenship distinction from Miller's reading of the Fourteenth Amendment's [[Citizenship Clause]], which had conferred national U.S. citizenship upon freed black slaves and superseded the Court's 1857 decision ''[[Dred Scott v. Sandford]]''.{{sfnp|Tribe|2000|p=1304}} Miller accepted that [[Article IV of the United States Constitution|Article IV of the U.S. Constitution]]'s original [[Privileges and Immunities Clause]], on which the Fourteenth Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause had been modeled, protected Americans' broad state rights.{{sfnp|Tribe|2000|pp=1304–05}} But Miller said the Fourteenth Amendment's language was distinguishable from the Article IV clause. Miller wrote—misquoting the Fourteenth Amendment's text—that the Privileges or Immunities Clause "speaks only of privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, and does not speak of those of citizens of the several states".<ref>''Slaughter-House Cases'', 83 U.S. at 74, quoted in {{harvp|Tribe|2000|p=1304}}.</ref> He concluded that "the entire domain of the privileges and immunities of the states ... lay within the constitutional and legislative power of the states, and without that of the Federal government".<ref>''Slaughter-House Cases'', 83 U.S. at 77, quoted in {{harvp|Tribe|2000|p=1306}}.</ref>

Miller wrote that the Court was not required to define all the "privileges and immunities" of federal citizenship, but listed ones such as the right to petition the [[United States Congress|U.S. Congress]], the right to vote in federal elections, the right to engage in interstate travel and commerce, the right to enter federal lands, and several others such as "the right to peaceably assemble and petition for redress of grievances" and "the privilege of the writ of ''habeas corpus''".{{sfnp|Tribe|2000|pp=1306–07}} Miller dispensed with any further listing of U.S. federal citizenship rights, saying that the Court was "of the opinion that the rights claimed by [the New Orleans butchers], if they have any existence, are not privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States within the meaning of the [Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]".<ref>''Slaughter-House Cases'', 83 U.S. at 80, quoted in {{harvp|Tribe|2000|p=1307}}.</ref>