page_title: Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana Board of Health
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana Board of Health / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Bodies of some of the lynched Italian Americans being arranged for public viewing. Illustrated American, April 4, 1891.
context_page_description: Compagnie Francaise de Navigation a Vapeur v. Louisiana Board of Health, 186 U.S. 380, was a United States Supreme Court case which held constitutional state laws requiring the involuntary quarantine of individuals to prevent the spread of disease. Louisiana's quarantine laws, Justice Edward White said, were a reasonable exercise of the state's police power that conflicted with neither the Dormant Commerce Clause nor the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In dissent, Justice Henry Billings Brown, joined by John Marshall Harlan, agreed that while quarantine laws were constitutional, Louisiana's went beyond the scope of the state's authority over interstate commerce, even violating several treaties between the United States and other nations.
  The case had arisen in 1898, when the S.S. Britannia sailed from Palermo to Marseille, then across the Atlantic for New Orleans. Before docking there, it had stopped at a state-run quarantine station further down the Mississippi River, where all 408 passengers, most of whom were Italian immigrants, were certified as free from disease.
context_section_description: Starting in 1796, when it was under Spanish colonial administration, New Orleans began suffering outbreaks of yellow fever every few years, and reported cases every summer. Death tolls began increasing, both from the disease and some then-common treatments for it (such as mercury injections), as the city's population grew following its return to French rule in 1800 and cession to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase three years later. The first American territorial governor, William C. C. Claiborne, lost two wives and his daughter to the disease, which he himself also contracted but recovered from.
  Many other migrants from elsewhere in the U.S. followed; they proved more susceptible to yellow fever than longtime residents. An 1817 outbreak killed 800 in New Orleans alone, prompting the state legislature to create a New Orleans Board of Health, the first government public health agency in the U.S., only to dissolve it two years later as ineffectual after an outbreak that year claimed 2,000 lives. These deaths were often exacerbated by local newspapers' refusal to report on the disease, as businesses feared the economic effects of a public panic.
  After an 1853 outbreak left almost 8,000 residents of New Orleans dead, the state again created a Board of Health and made it permanent. The Union Navy's blockade of New Orleans six years later, as the Civil War began, the city for the first time in the century recorded no deaths from yellow fever. When General Benjamin Butler took over control of the city when it fell to Union forces in 1862, he went further, dispatching 2,000 troops to dispose of the city's garbage and instituting a quarantine requirement for arriving ships. At a point 70 miles (110 km) down the Mississippi River from the city, all vessels were stopped by gunboats and held for 40 days while they were monitored for disease. There were few deaths from yellow fever in New Orleans for the remainder of the war.
  Yellow fever epidemics in the city resumed after the war, when an 1867 outbreak killed 3,000. During this one the Board of Health was active, putting quarantine flags on houses with known cases and fumigating spaces. The 1878 outbreak, which afflicted cities in the Lower Mississippi Valley as far north as Memphis, Tennessee, led the newspapers to abandon their past practice of downplaying outbreaks to avoid public panics since, they realized, it had actually made the epidemics worse.
  Businesses, particularly shipping companies, still chafed at the quarantine laws. In 1882 the Louisiana legislature amended the statutes to require that vessels stopping at the quarantine station pay as much as $30 ($800 in today's dollars) in fees, depending on their size, with the proceeds going to fund the board's operations and infrastructure. One New Orleans-based shipper challenged this in court as a tonnage tax, which they called an unconstitutional violation of the Commerce Clause since the federal government alone had authority to levy one; they further alleged that it was being used for the city of New Orleans' general revenue rather than its stated purpose.
  Four years later, the shipper's case reached the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal from its state counterpart. Unanimously, the nine justices held that the fee was not a tax and even if it were one, would still have been constitutional as while the federal government had the authority to require and enforce quarantines, it was only exclusive to it if it actually did so. As it had historically left that to the states, Louisiana could act as it saw fit within the Constitution to exercise its police power and protect public health.
  "If there is a city in the United States which has need of quarantine laws, it is New Orleans", Justice Samuel Freeman Miller, a physician prior to his legal career, wrote for the Court. He noted that despite being a hundred miles (160 km) upriver from the Gulf of Mexico, it was the largest and busiest port on that waterbody. Many of the ships that came to New Orleans from the Gulf often came from warmer countries to the south, wher
caption: Illustration of bodies of lynched Italian immigrants after 1891 incident
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