Congressman Alcee Hastings, whose major distinction is being one of only seven federal judges in the entire history of the United States to be impeached and removed from office for committing high crimes and misdemeanors, is boycotting the Democrat Convention over the decision of the DNC to give the delegates of Florida and Michigan only half a vote each, made this historically inaccurate statement.

At the beginning of our great countryÂ’s history my ancestors were counted as only 2/3 of a person....

Well, not exactly -- in reality it was 3/5 of a person, and only for purposes of representation in Congress.

Interestingly enough, I wrote about this very topic earlier this evening in response to one of my students in my college-level American Government class.

There is this popular notion that the Three-Fifths Compromise means that blacks were three-fifths of a human being. However, if you go back and read it in the Constitution, it deals with a very different issue -- should property be counted for purposes of representation and taxation.

The Northern delegates argued no -- that if slaves were chattel, then they should no more be counted for purposes of representation that cows, pigs, or chickens were. Their goal was to see to it that slave-owners, who acted in violation of the principles of liberty and equality by holding slaves, did not also do violence to the principle of self-government by gaining extra representation by counting those who would not EVER have a voice in government. In short, they were
operating on the principle that those who were entitled to neither liberty, equality, nor self-government under the laws of those states that recognized slavery (northern and southern -- slavery was legal in at least 10 of the 13 states at this time, though more prevalent in the South) should not be included in the total inhabitants of the state who would be represented in Congress.

The Southern delegates, on the other hand, took a pointedly different tack -- they were more than willing to count slaves as their equal in terms of being numerically represented in Congress, even as they denied them liberty, equality, and self-government.

It is really easy (and popular) to condemn the Three-Fifths Compromise today, with the benefit of 221 years of hindsight. After all, that extra representation that the slave-holding aristocracy of the South gained enabled the region's "peculiar institution" to continue for at least three decades beyond what it would have if the Northern delegates had prevailed -- and during that time the forces of slavocracy were able to foist the Missouri Compromise on the nation, along with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and various Fugitive Slave Laws, not to mention the infamous Gag Rule that for a decade forbade Congress to even consider the issues of abolition and emancipation by consigning citizen petitions on those subjects to oblivion without hearing in violation of the First Amendment right of the people to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

However, you got to the meat of the issue in your last sentence -- a majority of those who met in Philadelphia in 1787 recognized that the nation needed to replace the Articles of Confederation with something that created a more functional national government. And so they compromised on the issue, leaving it to future generations to deal with a question they could not.

Consider this, my friends -- without the Three-Fifths Compromise, there would have likely been no Constitution. Not only that, but very possibly the government of the Articles of Confederation would have collapsed within a few years, and with it the fledgling United States of America. for all that it was a compromise with evil (one for which this nation has paid dearly in every generation), are not we and the world better off for it having been made in order to preserve America as one nation?

Posted by: Greg at 04:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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