The Slaughterhouse decision enabled later exoneration of Colfax Massacre killers

Evidence

In Colfax, Louisiana, sixty-one armed Blacks barricaded themselves inside a courthouse on Easter Sunday, 1873. Democrats shelled the courthouse with artillery, snatched out the thirty-seven survivors, and executed them in the town square. The day after the Colfax Massacre, the US Supreme Court, including Grant’s four corporate lawyer appointees, massacred the civil rights protections of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases. White New Orleans butchers felt their economic “privileges and immunities” were being denied by the bribe-instigated 1869 Louisiana statute requiring them to do business at the Slaughterhouse Company. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Miller upheld the monopoly on April 14, 1873, distinguishing between national and state citizenship and citing Roger B. Taney’s Dred Scott opinion. The Fourteenth Amendment only protected the relatively few rights of national citizens, Miller stated. Three years later, this doctrinaire split between national and state citizenship allowed a unanimous Supreme Court to reverse the convictions of the perpetrators of the Colfax Massacre (murder prosecutions “rests alone with the States”), thus giving Louisiana the freedom to exonerate them. The Court also voided the Enforcement Acts and encouraged White terrorist organizations just in time for the election of 1876. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 674

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the policy-before-ideas inversion: the Court’s doctrinal carve-out (policy) facilitated white terror and the racial exoneration (idea/outcome), echoing corporate interests (Grant’s ‘corporate lawyer appointees’). — connects to: Colfax massacre killers all went free despite federal prosecutions — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2925