ABSTRACT

When the Kentucky Constitutional Convention of 1849 bolstered earlier protections for slaveholders and the institution of slavery, Samuel Miller, the future United States Supreme Court justice, decided to leave his hometown of Barbourville, Kentucky, and set out for the free soil of Keokuk, Iowa. Slaughterhouse, makes explicit what is almost always tacit: liberalism's construction of the human at the expense of animals. Before 1869 the butchers, through the Butchers Benevolent Association, had "forcibly driven off black competitors," but after the slaughterhouse regulation was passed, this specifically racialized exclusion was outlawed. Fears of contamination were not only, or even principally, germane to issues of sanitation, then, but to the very nature of slaughter, and the new architecture of the Crescent City Slaughterhouse was designed to address both issues. The Slaughterhouse Cases mark a moment in American legal history in which both humans and animals were being reinterpreted and relocated.