When the tide in the Mississippi fell, animal guts, blood, entrails and intestines tossed into the river from slaughterhouses upstream lodged around the pipes going into the New Orleans city reservoir.
In 1867, more than 3,000 people died of cholera in the Crescent City, as putrefied offal infected its drinking water.
It was the 14th Amendment to the Constitution — known as the birthright amendment and intended to provide citizenship and equal rights protection to people recently freed from slavery — that would help change the slaughterhouse situation in New Orleans and end the city's cholera epidemic.
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