The 3/5th clause did NOT decrease the power of slave holding states. It increased the power of slave holding states.
The “goal posts” were laid out in the OP. The fight to end slavery in American began as early as 1776!
I see’em in Nebraska right now…
Not in proportion to their population size. Stop making stuff up.
1619 re-write?
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How did that work out?
The census counted people and citizens, slaves were considered neither. If the northern states were allowed to apportion their chickens and barns, you might have a point, but they weren’t and you don’t.
Instead, you have a singularly distasteful and revisionist talking point.
The argument that the 3/5ths compromise took power away from the southern slaveholding states is an argument that has zero roots in the actual history and how the political landscape unfolded over the first half of the 1800’s.
It is pure revisionist clap trap.
Not surprised to see it though.
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They had zero… they went up to 3/5ths.
That is an increase, is it not?
And how did that work out?
They couldn’t see the future and predict the invention of the cotton gin would increase the demand for both land and slave labor to such a ravenous extent that it would burn down the nation.
Now I do not blame them for not getting rid of slavery… they seriously thought that it would go away on it’s own in a couple of generations and just like most major problems that humans face they were certain it would resolve itself without putting too much work into it themselves and experience the economic pain to end it.
That was for future generations to do.
I don’t think that they saw it as the existential threat that it would become.
But the argument that the 3/5 clause did not give slave holding states representation in Congress proportionately equal to their population size is factual.
I don’t believe that for a single second.
Rather, I think they knew that they were holding human beings in bondage, and simply didn’t care.
It isn’t.
Slaves were property. Not people. Full stop.
The state with the highest population and economic strength at the time was Virginia. The rest of the South was basically a backwater.
The compromise gave electoral power based on property… not constituency.
It is only correct if you stop at 1787 and read no further in history.
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The statement is factual, but the reality doesn’t comport. In order to be “population”, you must count people. Slaves were not people.
The Northwest Ordinance passed under the Congress of the Confederation.
The First Congress of the Untied States basically upheld that statute.
But after that it went downhill.
Kentucky was admitted directly as a slave State.
The Territory Southwest of the Ohio River legalized slavery and ultimately was admitted as the slave State of Tennessee.
The Mississippi Territory, once it was fully ceded by Georgia and the Spanish, was a slave territory and ultimately admitted as the slave States of Mississippi and Alabama.
The Louisiana Territory would start the great struggles between supporters and opponents of expansion of slavery into the territories.
Texas and Florida was admitted as a slave States.
The Mexican Cession took the previous struggles to the boiling point.
And during all this, we had two major compromises, the Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850.
The Northwest Ordinance was pretty much the single exception to the rule, not the rule.
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My statement is accurate. Read the clause in question.
I have read enough about that period that I honestly think that they did think it would resolve itself.
The move in western thought was moving away from slavery… not for any humanitarian cause but because of the nascent rise of industrialization.
Poor free whites did not like competing with slave labor because they knew that they would lose every single time.
I kind of look at it like modern issues around global warming. We all know that we need to do something about but we don’t because we don’t want to endure the economic cost and future generations will come up with something to solve it.
What was the practical effect of the 3/5ths compromise?
Don’t just read what they wrote…. Pay attention to what they did.
