It has already been shown that the purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment was the protection of the recently freed negro. The Thirteenth Amendment had forbidden slavery, but the southern states had passed apprentice and vagrancy laws which reduced the negro to a condition closely resembling slavery in certain of its aspects. The Fourteenth Amendment was designed to remedy such a condition by forbidding the states to abridge the privileges of citizens, or to deprive persons of life, liberty or property. Were the very vague phrases of the Amendment merely in keeping with the vagueness of many of the other grants of power in the Constitution, or were they designedly expressed in such a way as to accomplish something more than the protection of the freedman? The first decision of the Supreme Court involving the Amendment was that given in the Slaughter House Cases in 1873, which did not concern the negro in any way. In 1869 the legislature of Louisiana had given a corporation in that state the exclusive right to slaughter cattle within a large area, and had forbidden other persons to construct slaughter-houses within the limits of this region, but the corporation was to allow any other persons to use its buildings and equipment, charging fixed fees for the privilege. Cases were brought before the courts to determine whether the law violated that part of the Fourteenth Amendment which forbids a state to pass laws abridging the privileges of citizens and taking away their property without due process of law. By a vote of five to four the Court upheld the constitutionality of the statute. The majority held that the purpose of the Amendment was primarily the protection of the negro. This purpose, the Court thought, lay at the foundation of all three of the war amendments and without it no one of them would ever have been suggested. The majority did not believe that the Congress which passed the amendments or the state legislatures which ratified them intended to transfer the protection of the great body of civil rights from the states to the federal government. Neither did they think that due process of law had been interfered with by the Louisiana legislation. In reply to the objection that the slaughter-house law violated the clause, "nor shall any State deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," the majority declared: We doubt very much whether any action of a State not directed by way of discrimination against the negroes as a class, or on account of their race, will ever be held to come within the purview of this provision. In brief, then, the majority was inclined to preserve the balance between the states and the national government very much as it had been. It believed that the amendments should be applied mainly if not wholly to the fortunes of the freedman and that judicial review of such legislation as that in Louisiana concerning the slaughter of cattle should end in the state courts.