I've been reading a lot about social studies lately, because I'm in the middle of a class about social studies, and reading things like The Young People's Guide to American History by Howard Zinn, and trying to think critically about race.
The 3/5ths Compromise was a compromise between the North and the South over how to measure the population of slave states in order to decide how many representatives those states would get to the senate. Northern States felt slaves shouldn't be counted: they couldn't vote, after all, so counting them would ultimately increase the voice of the whites that were capable of voting. Southerners felt they should get the full count of slaves, since they were part of the population of the state.
Ultimately they decided to compromise slightly in favor of the South, meeting just slightly right of halfway between the two positions. In 1787, when the Compromise was passed, each Congressman represented about 34,000 people and there were about 700,000 slaves in the US, so slave states basically used slaves to increase the voice of their voting white men by an additional ~12 votes. In South Carolina, where slaves represented about 51% of the population, 60,000 white men found themselves represented 207,000 people with their votes.
A modern criticism of the Compromise seems to commonly hold that its framers viewed black people as 3/5ths of a person, and that THAT is monstrous. But it was white slave owners that were arguing that slaves counted as a person, purely for their own political benefit, while white non-slave-owners argued that they should count as zero... again, for their own benefit.. Nobody in this story is a hero, but the side I find myself agreeing with is also the side that would have counted black people as zero.
Which is a weird opinion to find myself having, after a critical examination of the facts.
The 3/5ths Compromise was a compromise between the North and the South over how to measure the population of slave states in order to decide how many representatives those states would get to the senate. Northern States felt slaves shouldn't be counted: they couldn't vote, after all, so counting them would ultimately increase the voice of the whites that were capable of voting. Southerners felt they should get the full count of slaves, since they were part of the population of the state.
Ultimately they decided to compromise slightly in favor of the South, meeting just slightly right of halfway between the two positions. In 1787, when the Compromise was passed, each Congressman represented about 34,000 people and there were about 700,000 slaves in the US, so slave states basically used slaves to increase the voice of their voting white men by an additional ~12 votes. In South Carolina, where slaves represented about 51% of the population, 60,000 white men found themselves represented 207,000 people with their votes.
A modern criticism of the Compromise seems to commonly hold that its framers viewed black people as 3/5ths of a person, and that THAT is monstrous. But it was white slave owners that were arguing that slaves counted as a person, purely for their own political benefit, while white non-slave-owners argued that they should count as zero... again, for their own benefit.. Nobody in this story is a hero, but the side I find myself agreeing with is also the side that would have counted black people as zero.
Which is a weird opinion to find myself having, after a critical examination of the facts.
