History
The Three-Fifths Compromise
The Three-Fifths Compromise was a decision made during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in the United States. It determined that three-fifths of the slave population would be counted for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress. This compromise was a significant factor in the ongoing debate over slavery and representation in the new nation.
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11 Key excerpts on "The Three-Fifths Compromise"
- Michael F. Conlin(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Indeed, they regarded The Three-Fifths Compromise as a ruinous Southern accommodation with the North. They wished their forebears had held out for five-fifths. The Southern Quar- terly Review remonstrated that the South had made the “largest conces- sions” at the Constitutional Convention. Ruing the three-fifths III,” De Bow’s Review 7 (Oct. 1849): 315; “Judge Abel P. Upshur,” Southern Literary Messenger 7 (Dec. 1841): 867; George Tucker, The Life of Thomas Jefferson, Third President of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1837), 2: 395. 28 “Politics Elements,” Southern Quarterly Review, 2d ser., 10 (Oct. 1854): 394; Lacy K. Ford, Jr., “Democracy in the United States: From Revolution to Civil War,” in Peter A. Coclanis and Stuart Weems Bruchey, eds., Ideas, Ideologies, and Social Movements: The United States Experience since 1800 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 34–35; Barbara J. Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 21; William A. Link, Roots of Secession: Slavery and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 17; Anthony Gene Carey, Parties, Slavery, and the Union in Antebellum Georgia (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 123. The Tyranny of the Northern Majority 101 compromise at the national level and the elimination of property qualifi- cations for voting at the state level, Alfred Huger, the Charleston post- master famous for burning antislavery pamphlets in 1835, reproached the slaveholding elite for making “fatal” errors that prevented their “just representation.” The Southern Literary Messenger came to the same conclusion. To ensure proper protection of slavery, the Messenger argued, the South should have the “whole number of her slaves represented.” Representative Muscoe R.
eBook - PDFTeaching Enslavement in American History
Lesson Plans and Primary Sources
- Chara Haeussler Bohan, H. Robert Baker, LaGarrett J. King, Caroline R. Pryor, Jason Stacy, Erik Alexander, Charlotte Johnson, James Mitchell, Caroline R. Pryor, Jason Stacy, Erik Alexander, Charlotte Johnson, James Mitchell(Authors)
- 2022(Publication Date)
For men whose vast fortunes depended upon those staples, giving over the commerce power to Congress—especially when the first Congress would return northern majorities—was perilous. Table 4.1: The Three-Fifths Compromise Date Action Analysis Result May 29, 1787 Virginia Plan includes proportional representation, based either on free inhabitants or on “quotas of contribution.” The Virginia Plan’s radical pivot was to abandon altogether representation based on equal state sovereignty. Tabled June 11, 1787 James Wilson proposes three- fifths clause. Charles Pinckney seconds. The major dispute is still between those who want to maintain equal state sovereignty and those who want proportional representation. Passed, 9–2 (opposed by NJ and DE) July 2, 1787 Connecticut Compromise proposed. Bicameral legislature, one based on free inhabitants + three-fifths of slaves, one based on equal state sovereignty. Sent to the Grand Committee July 5, 1787 Grand Committee endorses the Connecticut Compromise. Connecticut Compromise: • Branch 1: free inhabitants + three- fifths of slaves; • Branch 2: equal number from each state. Tabled July 9, 1787 Madison reiterates his proposal for proportional representation in a bicameral legislature. Madison’s proposal: • Branch 1: free inhabitants; • Branch 2: all inhabitants. Not seconded, not voted upon July 11, 1787 Butler moves to strike three- fifths clause from Connecticut Compromise. Would have increased the representa- tive power of slave states. Fails, 3–7 July 13, 1787 Three-fifths clause to be used in census in order to apportion future representation. Cements power of slaveholders, but also means that power will shift with population. Passed, 9-0-1 (Delaware divided) July 16, 1787 Grand Committee bicameral solution proposed. Three-fifths clause used to apportion representatives in House of Reps; equal representation of states in the Senate. Passed, 5-4-1 July 20, 1787 Three-fifths proposal extended to electoral college.
eBook - PDFA Slaveholders' Union
Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic
- George William Van Cleve(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
49 Conflicting representation theories advocated by one or more Convention delegates included those based on state, interest, or sectional representation; property representa-tion; representation of personal rights; and popular sovereignty. The particular concern of the slavery historiography has been about what the Constitution’s House of Representatives representation formula combining free and slave population—commonly called the three-fifths clause—signified. 50 That clause rejected both the idea that all property should be represented and the idea that free population only should be represented. In some ill-defined way it meant that, as Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania said, “property ought to have its weight; but not all the weight.” But what precisely did the three-fifths clause mean to those who adopted it, and how did it affect the status of slavery? 51 We can begin to answer these questions by considering a series of common but problematic views about how the three-fifths clause was adopted, and what it meant to contemporaries. The first of these flawed views is that adoption of the three-fifths clause was the predictable result of political decisions, either before or at the Convention, about the proper basis for the federal taxation system. Use of the federal ratio for determining some aspects of federal taxation was indeed a foregone conclusion before the Convention began. However, the question at the Convention was instead whether representation would be based on taxation principles, or would instead employ completely differ-ent principles such as equal state representation. As is well known, the text of the Constitution ultimately created a linkage between representation and direct taxation, nominally basing both on the three-fifths clause.
eBook - PDFThe African American Electorate
A Statistical History
- Hanes Walton, Sherman C. Puckett, Donald R. Deskins(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
114 Chapter 5 Accounting for the Missing “Two-Fifths of a Person” The Three-Fifths Clause enhanced the power of the slave states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. Such a constitutional clause not only depicted the other two-fifths (2/5ths) of every slave as a non-person/non-human and simply property but the whole of these slaves as non-political forces and factors. The clause put 40% of the slave population tally completely outside of the political system in order to limit the political enrichment of slave states. But certainly the concept may very well have had the result of discounting full suffrage rights for Free-Men-and-Women-of-Color, even in non-slave states. In fact, no previous scholarly work on the Three-Fifths Clause has ever empirically analyzed the 2/5ths feature longitu-dinally. By presenting only 60% of a people, one leaves out the other 40%, and the resultant portrait is only a partial one. Discus-sion of this second dimension permits a complete portrait. Nor has anyone, at this writing, empirically analyzed what eventually happened to the Three-Fifths Clause in terms of the representa-tion of former slave states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College when action of the federal government eventually reversed the Three-Fifths Clause. Figure 5.11 shows the political meaning of the 2/5ths feature throughout the Antebellum Era. Holding slaves generated more representation and enhanced political power for the slave states up until 1830. Although the overall slave population steadily declined as a proportion of total population, among slave states the uncounted 2/5ths portion of slaves still remained as a potential reapportionment bonanza. But realizing this voting power would have required remov-ing the yoke of slavery from most African Americans in slave states. The equivalent of nearly one million slaves were excluded from the 1840 House of Representatives reapportionment.
eBook - PDFNo Property in Man
Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding, With a New Preface
- Sean Wilentz(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
The three-fifths and fugitive slave clauses would elicit forceful objections from New Englanders in decades to come, but they turned up less frequently than might be expected during the ratification debates. The three-fifths clause, the Massachusetts Anti-Federalist Silas Lee complained to a friend, would increase the representation of the southern states “to undue proportion.” 15 So long as there was little chance that the national government would assess direct taxes, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Represen-tatives James Warren observed, New England would “receive no kind of benefit” from the three-fifths ratio but instead be at “the mercy of the states having slaves.” 16 The fugitive slave clause, Moses Brown wrote, appeared to have been “designd to Distroy the Present Assylum of the Massachusets from being as a City of Refuge for the poor Blacks.” 17 New Englanders were also among the first to charge that the framers had sneakily covered up their concessions to slavery with confounding euphemisms. Just weeks after the Federal Convention ended, an aging part-time doctor and mill owner in Connecticut, Benjamin Gale, spoke his mind at the town meeting that had elected him to his state’s ratifi-cation convention. The Constitution, Gale declared, was “as dark, in-tricate, artful, crafty, and unintelligible [a] composition that I ever read or see composed by man. ” The three-fifths clause—designed, he said, to help create an oppressive national aristocracy—offended with its reference to “persons”: “Why could they not have spoke out in plain terms— Negroes ?” The slave trade clause was just as bad, resorting, he said, to a “sly cunning and artful mode of expression” in order to spare those “who may have some tender feelings and a just sense of the rights of human nature.” 18 SLAVERY, ANTISLAVERY, AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RATIFICATION 121 The most impassioned New England disavowals came over the At-lantic slave trade provision.
- William M. Wiecek(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cornell University Press(Publisher)
23Madison, 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.”24The 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 54.26Carefully 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
eBook - ePubThe Hidden History of the War on Voting
Who Stole Your Vote—and How To Get It Back
- Thom Hartmann(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Berrett-Koehler Publishers(Publisher)
10Like 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.”11Nonetheless, 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
eBook - PDFRoger Sherman
Signer and Statesman
- Roger Sherman Boardman(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
252 THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION while the large States were refusing any equal representa-tion. With the Compromise, the government adopted was partly national and partly federal. True, it contained germs of future dissension; but at the moment, if the Convention was to continue, it was a great and necessary triumph. in The critical importance of the Connecticut Compromise just considered no scholar denies. There were not just two other outstanding ones, as was formerly taught—the Constitution as finally put forth has well been called a bundle of com-promises. 27 Despite excited debate in some cases, settlements were made without great difficulty. This was true of that illogical arrangement whereby a slave was accounted for pur-poses of State representation as equivalent to three-fifths of a white man; 28 the same value had been proposed for requisi-tion purposes by the Continental Congress in 1783. So too with the compromise by which the Carolinas and Georgia, desiring that the States might share with the national gov-ernment power over foreign commerce, conceded this claim in return for the northern-state concession that the foreign-slave trade might be permitted till the year 1808. There was no serious danger of the Convention's disruption over this issue, though to it we owe Mason's noble denunciation of the slave trade. And it must be conceded that the Connecticut members were too cold toward those flaming words. Sher-man disapproved of the slave trade; yet as the States were now possessed of the right to import slaves, as the public good did not require it to be taken from them, & as it was expedient to have as few objections as possible to the pro-posed scheme of Government, he thought it best to leave the matter as we find it. Moreover, the abolition of Slavery seemed to be going on in the U. S. & the good sense of the several States would probably by degrees compleat it. 29 17 Max Farrand, The Framing of the Constitution, p.
eBook - PDFCompromise and the American Founding
The Quest for the People's Two Bodies
- Alin Fumurescu(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
For example, the infamous Three-Fifths Compromise ended up forever binding representation to popula- tion, not to property, by driving the southern delegates to insist, for the wrong reasons, on constitutional rules for both census and reapportionment. 10 I shall argue that, paradoxically, by not being specifically empowered to craft a radically new constitution, the delegates were able to combine in an original way the two understandings of the people, if for no other reason than to justify their breach of mandate through a higher purpose. As Elbridge Gerry observed on July 5, We were . . . in a peculiar situation. We were neither the same Nation not different Nations. We ought not therefore to pursue the one or the other of these ideas too closely. If no compromise should take place what will be the consequence. A secession he foresaw will take place; for some gentlemen seem decided on it; two different plans will be proposed; and the result no man could foresee. If we do not come to some agreement among ourselves some foreign sword will probably do the work for us. 11 This quote captures the sentiment of urgency mentioned above; the choice was a compromise or a doomsday scenario. Most importantly, it proposes a compromise by intentionally avoiding the rhetorical trap of one vs. different nations or peoples. It is another proof that most practical problems have rhetorical solutions. There is little doubt that the distinction between one and several nations was in the minds of all delegates, and it laid at the core of many of Philadelphia’s disagreements. Yet I shall argue that, in the long run, the real issue was not the obvious tension between the Union and the states, or between the “federal” and the “national” principles, but between the people’s two bodies. From Philadelphia on, the American peculiarity could be rephrased: “We are neither a corporate people nor a collection of individuals.
eBook - ePubAmerica's Second Revolution
How George Washington Defeated Patrick Henry and Saved the Nation
- Harlow Giles Unger(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Trade Paper Press(Publisher)
Theorizing that Washington may well have helped author Hamilton’s “monarchic” proposals, some delegates began edging toward compromise. As their first step, they reconsidered Roger Sherman’s Connecticut Compromise, which they had rejected on June 11. As three large states—Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania—edged toward compromise with three small states—Connecticut, New Jersey, and Delaware—New York’s two remaining delegates—both Antifederalists—stomped out in protest, leaving only ten states in attendance. To make matters worse, the two New Yorkers violated the secrecy rule of the Convention by reporting all details of Convention proceedings to New York governor George Clinton, whom Hamilton blamed for the walkout. Clinton had, in fact, held his office for ten years and accumulated enormous power and wealth that he feared he would lose if a strong national government acceded to office.On July 16 the remaining delegates in Philadelphia put aside their personal dislikes of the man and adopted Roger Sherman’s Connecticut Compromise and solved the hitherto insoluble problem of voting in the two houses by establishing proportionate representation in the lower house and parity in the upper house, but giving the lower house sole right to originate appropriations legislation. Each state in the lower house would cast votes proportionate to the total of its free population and three-fifths of its slave population, while each state in the upper house would have but one vote, giving the small states parity with large states. But the South wanted more—a requirement of a two-thirds vote in the Senate for ratification of all treaties with foreign nations. Southerners had not forgotten that only two years earlier, northern states in Congress had almost ceded American navigation rights on the Mississippi River to Spain—rights that were “essential to the prosperity and happiness of the western inhabitants” of Virginia and the other southern states, whose western portions extended to the Mississippi River. Although the northern majority in Congress had approved the treaty by a bare majority, the Articles of Confederation had protected southern interests by requiring approval by nine of the thirteen states to ratify treaties. The South insisted on—and won—the same protection in the new Constitution.
eBook - ePubMadison’s Hand
Revising the Constitutional Convention
- Mary Sarah Bilder(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
He tracked the prominent northern delegates’ support—albeit reluctant—for the three-fifths ratio’s inclusion in proportional representation. In the Notes, the Massachusetts delegation loomed large. Gorham seemed to accept the three-fifths clause. Madison seemed worried about King. By the end of July 11, the Notes recorded King making a convoluted claim about the inclusion of enslaved people: “He had never said as to any particular point that he would in no event acquiesce in & support it.” Nonetheless, a day later, King apparently reached a pragmatic conclusion. When “the Southern states shall be more numerous than the Northern, they can & will hold a language that will force” their result—Madison then immediately decided “force” was too strong, crossed it out, and wrote “awe.” On the Pennsylvania delegation, Wilson acknowledged that the three-fifths clause made absolutely no sense but agreed that such “difficulties” had to be “overruled by the necessity of compromise.” The Notes accurately reflected a division within Massachusetts. The delegation divided on the July 12 vote to approve the three-fifths clause. Recording speeches was Madison’s method of tracking individual positions within the two large, northern states. 52 Only one delegate in the Notes objected to the strategy of encouraging sectional division. Over three days, Madison recorded Morris’s passionate criticism. On Wednesday, July 11, Morris described “the dilemma of doing injustice to the Southern States or to human nature.” He preferred injustice to the South. He did not want to “give such encouragement to the slave trade,” and he “did not believe that those States would ever confederate on terms that would deprive them of that trade.” On Thursday, Morris repeated that it was “high time to speak out.” He insisted that Pennsylvania “will never agree to the representation of Negroes”—meaning representation based on ownership in slaves. On Friday, he accused Madison of instigating the sectional divide
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