The Three-Fifths Compromise

2 Key excerpts on "The Three-Fifths Compromise"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Sources of Anti-Slavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848

  • William M. Wiecek(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cornell University Press

    (Publisher)

  23

  Madison, writing for a northern audience in Federalist Number 54, expanded on this point. He reviewed the basic northern argument against fractional slave representation: because the southern states considered the slaves property, they should be included in the enumeration for tax purposes at one hundred percent, and excluded altogether for apportionment purposes. To this, he replied, “the true state of the case is, that they partake of both these qualities; being considered by our laws, in some respects as persons, and in other respects, as property.” Therefore, “let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted, which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants, which regards the slave as divested of two-fifths of the man.” This was an odd, yet not altogether illogical way of putting it, though Madison admitted that some of these arguments were “a little strained in some points.”24

  The federal number clause provoked surprisingly little debate in the ratifying conventions. In the South, Federalists touted its advantages, arguing that it was at the least “the only practicable rule or criterion of representation,” and at best “an immense concession in our favour.”25 In the North, Federalists faintly apologized for it along the lines of Madison’s Federalist 54.26

  Carefully wrought as the compromise over fractional slave representation was, it was almost undone by the overreaching of the deep-South bloc in the matter of the foreign slave trade. The Carolinians’ inflexibility in this matter brought on the second crisis of the Convention. The slave trade was a sensitive topic.27 Spokesmen of the upper South considered it an “inhuman traffic,” and George Mason played Cassandra when he warned that “the Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands; and will fill that Country with slaves if they can be got thro’ S. Carolina & Georgia.”28 Yet the South Carolinians unapologetically insisted on its necessity for their state and Georgia. They needed the trade if they were to expand their slave population significantly by any means other than natural increase. Between 1735 and 1775, six out of seven slaves imported into South Carolina came from Africa, one from the islands, and only a statistically insignificant number from other mainland colonies.29 Carolinians argued that the New Englanders and Virginians, who were the most vocal critics of the trade, were estopped from condemning them for wanting to keep it open, the Virginians because of their obvious self-interest—with the trade closed, the prices of Virginia’s slaves would rise—and the New Englanders because so much of the trade had been, and still was, carried in New England bottoms. Indeed, if men like John Brown, a merchant of Providence, Rhode Island, and brother of the Quaker abolitionist Moses Brown, had their way, New England slavers would ply their trade as long as the New World provided a vent for it: “This Trade has been permitted by the Supreame Govenour of all things for time Immemmoriel and … allowed by all the Nations of Europe… . I cannot thinke this State ought to Decline the Trade.”30

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  eBook - ePub

  The Hidden History of the War on Voting

  Who Stole Your Vote—and How to Get It Back

  • Thom Hartmann(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Berrett-Koehler Publishers

    (Publisher)

  10

  Like The Three-Fifths Compromise, the form of the Senate was the result of slavery as much as it was a conflict between large and small states. After all, several of the slave states, when their black population was excluded, had a similar number of white male voters as the medium-sized Northern states.

  Samuel Thatcher of Massachusetts objected bitterly, saying, “The representation of slaves adds thirteen members to this House in the present Congress, and eighteen Electors of President and Vice President at the next election.”11

  Nonetheless, America continued to elect slaveholders to the White House all the way through the presidency of Andrew Jackson, in large part because of both the undemocratic nature of the Senate and The Three-Fifths Compromise.

  The 15th Amendment resolved the three-fifths issue on paper, but the issue of how each state having two senators skewed the Electoral College persisted.

  In 1934, the Senate came within two votes of the two-thirds necessary to pass a constitutional amendment to the states to eliminate the Electoral College and go to direct election of the president. Senator Alben Barkley, D-Kentucky (later Harry Truman’s vice president), stated, “The American people are qualified to elect their president by a direct vote, and I hope to see the day when they will.”12

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