The Slaughterhouse Cases

The painting is by the Texan artist Debra Hurd. Many of her paintings can be found here, and they are to my untrained eye very good. If anyone reading this is taken by them, I think that they are available for sale. Ms Hurd herself is a blogger, who can be found here. Go have a look; as is the way with bloggers, I am only posting the picture here to illustrate a point, but I would be glad if Ms Hurd made money incidentally out of it.

It's odd how ideas and events lap each other like the water in a tidal river. It was reported the other day that Egypt, like a good many other states, has taken the excuse of swine flu to kill pigs, and in effect to move against the coptic Christians subsisting in that country. As I understand it, you can't get swine flu from thermally treated meat, but it could be on untreated cuts. Then again, there does seem to be a great deal of politics going on. Russia and Asia are at it too.

The action made me think of the famous slaughterhouse cases of New Orleans, which provided the cover for a hundred years of African-American oppression under cover of the sovereignty of states.

New Orleans, beneath sea level, is a city prone to sickness. Between 1839 and 1860, 26000 of its people died of cholera; for six years after 1914, it suffered bubonic plague. This was in part because of its role as a port, and it was this status that allowed it to be amongst the first areas to be occupied by the Union in the American Civil War.

The occupation of N'awlins meant its government by Ben Butler, who was declared a war criminal by the Confederacy--'an enemy of all mankind', hostilis humanis generis-- for threatening to treat the ladies of the town as prostitutes for the purposes of the law if they kept emptying their chamberpots over his soldiers. I never thought before how serious a gesture that was on the part of the women in a sick city.

The status didn't stop Butler displacing Lincoln in the hearts of many Republicans in 1864, so much so that many wanted the former for President (though they settled on John Charles Fremont) and Lincoln was forced to run as a National Unionist. The fall of Atlanta and the Emancipator's victory put paid to all that, but it did leave Louisiana unreconstructed and a test-case for how the new American nation would be run. It also left the disastrous Andrew Johnson, a War Democrat and National Unionist, in the chair John Wilkes Booth made vacant.

A high degree of local autonomy was created. People often point to the end of the Huey Long administration later on as the reason why the City's Mayor was displaced in favour of the Attorney general ( which, indirectly, led to Big Jim Garrison's ludicrous campaign against the Warren Commission when he held the office) but actually, the reconstructed State of Louisiana was always keen to assert itself over its cities. What else do you expect in as diverse a linguistic and social bouillabaisse as Louisiana than a very strong centre?

In 1872, facing poison and plague from the city's many abattoirs, the state decided to centralise all slaughterhouses on an island. This meant that slaughter men were deprived of their rights in favour of the wider rights of the city and state, and despite their common law right to a trade. When this was upheld as within 'police power' by the United States Supreme Court, state sovereignty was granted practical expression.

This one development legally undercut attempts, not that the Supreme Court was at all willing to enforce them, to make the federal bill of rights protect individuals and companies as the Fourteenth Amendment had intended. There is a direct line between the fear of dirty meat in that often-poisoned city that care occasionally forgets, and the roughly weekly lynchings that marked black life between 1866 and 1965.

So a worry about slaughtered animals led a southern state to build a slaughterhouse; this led to their police power; this police power led to the segregation and control of black people and the separation of races 'for the public benefit'.

It was all touted as scientific, and by the time the deal was done, there was no legal avenue for African-Americans to turn to. Law and science, which are in many cases mutable, and wrong, are often at their worst when they appeal to utilitarianism and consensus. A century and a quarter ago, the consensus was that race existed and race mixing was as dangerous as unregulated pig slaughtering. What nonsense people will believe.

I thought of this when I saw the story from Egypt. I also thought of Winston Churchill, who once claimed that he thought cats felt superior, dogs were inferiors, but that the eye of a pig told you it knew it was an equal. I hope that we all come to our senses soon.