The part of the 14th Amendment that we're concerned with right now is essentially an extension of the Bill of Rights; it says that all citizens are citizens of the USA and the state in which they live, and guarantees that they may all have the same rights laid out in the constitution, and says that the states may not interfere or take those rights away. This is called the Equal Protection Clause.
The Slaughterhouse
In 1869, the City of New Orleans created a corporation to move the slaughterhouse of the city. There was actually no legitimate slaughterhouse of New Orleans at the time, and butchers would just slaughter their hogs and such wherever they wanted to in the streets. The butchers, (all white by the way), would dispose of the waste and offal by simply dumping it in the Mississippi River upriver from the city. This water would then travel down the river, and you can imagine what it was full of, and eventually joined with the main water pipeline. All the blood, urine, and waste that the animals produced was feeding into the water supply of New Orleans, causing unhealthful conditions and being a contributing factor in many cholera outbreaks. Because this had been going on for too long and was clearly a problem, New Orleans, with support from the state, decided to create a corporation to create a new slaughterhouse that would be moved down river from the city. It even had a state inspector to make sure all the goings-on in the place complied. The company in charge of the slaughterhouse, Crescent City (for short), was given exclusive rights to New Orleans; no other companies were allowed to operate slaughterhouses in the city.
The butchers of New Orleans didn't like this at all. They argued that this new corporation was a monopoly and an "unfair practice." They even went as far as to say that it was, in fact, unconstitutional, since this new slaughterhouse took away their "privilege" of operating a slaughterhouse company, and so was detrimental to them because it took away their living. The Louisiana state courts ruled that the slaughterhouse was constitutional, and the butchers appealed to the Supreme Court, who dealt with it in 1872 and made their final decision on April 14th of the next year.
The Supreme Court Building
The Supreme Court returned with a 4/5 ruling that the Crescent City slaughterhouse was not unconstitutional, and did not violate the 14th Amendment because the 14th only applied to the rights of American citizenship, not "state citizenship." (Do you think of yourself as a citizen of your state? No? Well back then, that sentiment was not uncommon.) They said that the rights of American citizenship were only those expressly stated in the Constitution and everything else was left up to the states, however the states were not required to grant their 'citizens' special privileges, such as the right to open a slaughterhouse.The Supreme Court also stated that, contrary to the complaints of the butchers, nobody was being deprived of a way to make a living, since they would be allowed to continue their practice as long as it was on the property of the Crescent City Company.
Another and very important side of the ruling was that the 14th Amendment (along with the 13th and 15th) were passed to grant and protect the rights of ex-slaves (freedmen), and so could only be narrowly interpreted. In the eyes of the court majority, there was nothing in the 14th that stated that all ethnicities were to be granted the same economic rights and privileges by the states in which they lived. One of the justices, Samuel Miller, wrote the opinion for the case, and in it he drew a clear distinction between the rights of American citizenship verses state citizenship. In the opinion, he basically rejected the idea that the Federal Government could legislate on civil rights, and that the application of any rights not explicitly stated in the constitution would be completely up to the states for interpretation. What this opinion did was make the 14th Amendment essentially an insignificant addition to the constitution, totally robbed of meaning.
Stephen J. Field
The Slaughterhouse decision and Miller's opinion severely weakened the application of the 14th Amendment for a time. The one dissenting vote on the case was cast by Stephen J. Field, a Supreme Court justice from California who strongly believed that the 14th Amendment was meant to be applied to all Americans, regardless of race or state. In 1937, long after Field's death in 1899, more than 60 years after the Slaughterhouse decision and the narrow interpretation of the 14th, the Supreme Court switched their majority decision over from Miller's opinion to Field's.
