page_990 < previous page page_990 next page > Page 990 cials in 1890 because he made no effort to stop the dancing at Standing Rock. When Indian police were sent to arrest him on December 15, 1890, Sitting Bull was killed in a melee outside his cabin. Alexander B. Adams, Sitting Bull: An Epic of the Plains (1973); Stanley Vestal, Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux (1957). DEE BROWN See also Cody, Buffalo Bill; Crazy Horse; Custer, George Armstrong; Indians. Slaughterhouse Cases This Supreme Court ruling in 1873 had profound effects on the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed originally to protect the freedoms of former slaves. In 1869, Louisiana chartered a meat-packing company and gave it a monopoly over butchering in New Orleans in order, it was said, to protect peoples' health. A group of white butchers sued, claiming that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided that states could not deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. In a 54 decision, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment protected only the ex-slaves, not butchers, and that it affected only those rights related to national citizenship, not the right of the states to exercise their regulatory powers. The dissent by Justice Stephen J. Field, however, had a more profound effect on how future justices would view the amendment. A Lincoln appointee, Field was nonetheless a Democrat who opposed Radical Reconstruction. He argued in his dissent that the amendment gave the federal government broader powers than Justice Samuel F. Miller's majority opinion claimed. Field was not trying to involve the federal government in protecting black civil rights; rather, he wanted the federal government to be able to stop the states from regulating such economic interests as railroads, actions that groups like the Grange were urging. Field's opinion became the center of conservative judicial views of the Constitution into the next century, giving the Fourteenth Amendment a meaning different from the one its authors intended. See also Constitution. Slavery I The Institution of Slavery Slavery has been of signal importance in American history. During the antebellum period, it undergirded the nation's economy, increasingly dominated its politics, and finally led to civil war between North and South. After that war, the legacy of slavery continued to shape much of American history, from the struggle over Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s to the struggle over civil rights a century later. Forced labor emerged in the American colonies, as it did elsewhere in the New World, to meet a pervasive labor shortage that resulted when settlers sought commercial exploitation of agricultural staples (primarily tobacco in the Upper South and rice in the Lower South) in areas of low population density. Although twenty Africans were sold to settlers in Virginia as early as 1619, throughout most of the seventeenth century white indentured servants were far more numerous in the English mainland colonies than African slaves. Only after 1680, when the flow of indentured migrants from Europe diminished, did European servitude increasingly give way to African slavery. By the middle of the eighteenth century, slavery existed in all thirteen colonies and formed the heart of the agricultural labor system in the southern colonies. In the years following the American Revolution, slavery, which had never been so prevalent or economically important in the North as in the South, became the South's "peculiar institution." Between 1774 and 1804 all the northern states undertook to abolish slavery. In some states emancipation was immediate, but more often  as in New York and New Jersey  it was gradual, freeing slaves born after passage of the state's emancipation act when they reached a given age (usually in their twenties). But despite widespread questioning of its morality and a proliferation of private manumissions in the Upper South during the revolutionary era, bondage  < previous page page_990 next page >