Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith of Indiana went on record to praise the “3/5ths Compromise” in the United States Constitution. Democrats compared a bill currently in the state legislature to the “3/5ths Compromise.” Lt. Gov. Beckwith responded that:
“They were saying this is a bad bill because it actually encourages discrimination, just like the Three-Fifths Compromise going all the way back to the foundations of our nation. I would like to share with you the Three-Fifths Compromise is not a pro-discrimination compromise. It was not a pro-discrimination or a slave-driving compromise that the founders made. It was actually just the opposite. Don’t buy into the DEI radical revisionist history that is happening in today’s culture. Know your history. Go back and study the documents. Read them for yourself like I have. Go look them up and you will find that the Three-Fifths Compromise and many other things like that were designed to make sure that justice was equal for all people and equality really meant equality for all.”
Beckwith added that; “They came up with a Three-Fifths Compromise. They said you will only get three-fifths of a vote when it comes to your slave. And what that did, it actually limited the number of pro-slave representatives in Congress by 40%. This was a great move by the North to make sure that slavery would be eradicated in our nation. They knew what they were doing. But now here you have Senate Democrats in today’s American Republic who do not understand that.”
I went to law school about forty years ago. At the time, when I took Constitutional Law, there was not even a suggestion that the “3/5th Compromise” was included in the Constitution to protect individual rights, let alone protect African Americans.
Beckwith says that the view that the Compromise was not to “make sure that justice was equal for all” is part of the “radical revisionist history that is happening today…” He claims it comes from “the DEI radical revisionist history that is happening in today’s culture.” I don’t even remember hearing the term DEI back when I was in school and first studied the “3/5ths Compromise” at the doctoral level in the early 1980s!
Most scholarly researchers agreed that the Compromise was never intended “to make sure that justice was equal for all people and equality really meant equality for all,” in Beckwith’s characterization. In 1787, as the Constitutional Convention met, Southern slaveholding states characterized Black slaves as property, not people. Their representatives said that the protections of the Constitution did not apply to enslaved African Americans. Northern representatives said that “property” could be taxed, but that it could not be part of the calculation of how many people lived in a state since other forms of property, for example horses or tables could not be calculated as “people” for the determination of how many seats each state got in Congress or how many electoral votes each state could cast for the president. Southern states wanted Blacks to be fully counted as a person, while Northern states said that since slaves were property their numbers could not increase the population of the states of their masters.
Now, let us be clear, the Northern states were not looking to abolish slavery, however they did not want to extend political power to Southern states that wanted to count their slaves as full humans without acknowledging that the Constitution protected them.
A lot of discussion of this compromise focuses on the lack of voting rights, but I think that is not the appropriate discussion to have here. For example, even today, a 17 year-old cannot vote, but if born or naturalized as a citizen, he is still a citizen. Also, where the Constitution says that certain protections are for “people”, an immigrant is also protected by that clause. In 1787 much more than half the people could not vote, including women, unnaturalized immigrants, and children, yet they were all included in the full count of the state’s population and had rights accorded to them by the Constitution. Enslaved Blacks, however, did have the same rights as citizens or immigrants living in the United States.
After the Constitution was written, James Madison wrote Federalist Papers Number 54 which went into the Southern argument:
“We subscribe to the doctrine,” might one of our Southern brethren observe, “that representation relates more immediately to persons, and taxation more immediately to property, and we join in the application of this distinction to the case of our slaves. But we must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. 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…Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth, a peculiar one. 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…The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied, that these are the proper criterion; because it is only under the pretext that the laws have transformed the negroes into subjects of property, that a place is disputed them in the computation of numbers; and it is admitted, that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants.
In other words, an enslaved Black man had no rights under the Constitution, but he could supply his state with 3/5th of a “man” for representation.
The Compromise was presented by James Wilson, a conservative from Pennsylvania. Wilson was a brilliant legal mind at the end of the 18th Century. He owned at least one slave, but he did say that slavery should ultimately be abolished. Wilson was a leading speaker at the Convention and his greatest achievement was the 3/5th Compromise. He saw it as a way of securing the South for the new nation. In this, he was James Madison’s ablest ally in the convention.
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