Three-fifths Compromise
The Three-fifths Compromise was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in a state's total population. This count would determine: the number of seats in the House of Representatives; the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated; and how much money the states would pay in taxes. Slave holding states wanted their entire population to be counted to determine the number of Representatives those states could elect and send to Congress. Free states wanted to exclude the counting of slave populations in slave states, since those slaves had no voting rights. A compromise was struck to resolve this impasse. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives, effectively giving the Southern states more power in the House relative to the Northern states. It also gave slaveholders similarly enlarged powers in Southern legislatures; this was an issue in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863. Free blacks and indentured servants were not subject to the compromise, and each was counted as one full person for representation.[1]
In the United States Constitution, the Three-fifths Compromise is part of Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) later superseded this clause and explicitly repealed the compromise.
Drafting and ratification in the Constitution[edit]
Confederation Congress[edit]
The three-fifths ratio originated with an amendment proposed to the Articles of Confederation on April 18, 1783.[3]: 112 [4] The amendment was to have changed the basis for determining the wealth of each state, and hence its tax obligations, from real estate to population, as a measure of ability to produce wealth. The proposal by a committee of the Congress had suggested that taxes "shall be supplied by the several colonies in proportion to the number of inhabitants of every age, sex, and quality, except Indians not paying taxes".[5]: 51 [6] The South immediately objected to this formula since it would include slaves, who were viewed primarily as property, in calculating the amount of taxes to be paid. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in his notes on the debates, the Southern states would be taxed "according to their numbers and their wealth conjunctly, while the northern would be taxed on numbers only".[5]: 51–52
After proposed compromises of one-half by Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and three-fourths by several New Englanders failed to gain sufficient support, Congress finally settled on the three-fifths ratio proposed by James Madison.[5]: 53 But this amendment ultimately failed, falling two states short of the unanimous approval required to amend the Articles of Confederation (New Hampshire and New York opposed it).
Federalist Papers 54–55[edit]
Madison explained the reasoning for the 3/5 in Federalist No. 54 "The Apportionment of Members Among the States" (February 12, 1788)[7] as:
After the Civil War[edit]
Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) later superseded Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 and explicitly repealed the compromise. It provides that "representatives shall be apportioned ... counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed." A later provision of the same clause reduced the Congressional representation of states who denied the right to vote to adult male citizens, but this provision was never effectively enforced.[25] (The Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865, had already eliminated almost all persons from the original clause's jurisdiction by banning slavery; the only remaining persons subject to it were those sentenced for a crime to penal servitude, which the amendment excluded from the ban.)
After the Reconstruction Era came to an end in 1877, the former slave states subverted the objective of these changes by using terrorism and other illegal tactics to disenfranchise their black citizens, while obtaining the benefit of apportionment of representatives on the basis of the total populations. These measures effectively gave white Southerners even greater voting power than they had in the antebellum era, inflating the number of Southern Democrats in the House of Representatives as well as the number of votes they could exercise in the Electoral College in the election of the president.[26]
The disenfranchisement of black citizens eventually attracted the attention of Congress, and, in 1900, some members proposed stripping the South of seats, related to the number of people who were barred from voting.[27] In the end, Congress did not act to change apportionment, largely because of the power of the Southern bloc. The Southern bloc comprised Southern Democrats voted into office by white voters and constituted a powerful voting bloc in Congress until the 1960s. Their representatives, re-elected repeatedly by one-party states, controlled numerous chairmanships of important committees in both houses on the basis of seniority, giving them control over rules, budgets and important patronage projects, among other issues. Their power allowed them to defeat federal legislation against racial violence and abuses in the South,[28] until overcome by the civil rights movement.
Historical interpretation[edit]
There is a persistent and sometimes contentious debate among historians, legal scholars, and political scientists over whether the Three-Fifths Compromise should be construed to support the notion that slaves were conceived of not only demographically, but also ontologically, three-fifths of a person or whether the three-fifths was purely a statistical designation used to determine how many representatives Southern states would have in Congress.[29][30] A frequent claim made in favor of the former argument is that previous electoral precedent held that one man was equivalent to one vote, and the fact that the compromise explicitly tied personhood to votes provides a basis for an ontological reading of the compromise as implying that enslaved people lacked full personhood.[31][32][33] Supporters of the statistical argument dispute that ontological considerations were present in the mind of Congress at the time or that the Three-Fifths Compromise had any regard for such notions in its purpose and function.[34] However, it is generally agreed upon and historiographically reflected that enslaved people had no legal recourse or standing to challenge or participate in any kind of electoral legislation or activities of their own accord, which was confirmed 70 years later by the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford. This inequality in electoral rights did not substantively change until after the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965.