I’m curious to know what arguments both sides used, especially those who wanted to fully count slaves.
Did they try to give even a veneer of principle to their insistence on fully counting slaves or were they fully open about it being realpolitik?
I think everything hinges on “compromise”: one side wanted slaves counted as part of the population, the other side didn’t, and this ridiculous pro-ration was where the argument settled. I don’t think anyone was under the impression it was a “realistic” argument.
I believe part of it was that slaves being only 3/5 forestalled them becoming a majority in any area, which was the fear in counties with 5,000 whites and 8,000 slaves, and kept slave populations from determining things like representation.
It’s interesting to recall that the anti-slavery crowed (i.e., the good guys) didn’t want the slaves counted at all. The pro slavery types, wanted them to count as full people for census purposes.
That’s it, and I’d like to nominate this for best username/post/thread combo of 2015.
I can see the argument of the abolitionists: Either fully consider them to be people or don’t.
The slavers, I’m not seeing any argument that halfway makes sense.
Allowing the slave states to count slaves for census purposes would have given those states much higher populations, and thus far more representation in Congress. For what were essentially fictional citizens, without any rights at all.
The argument was “we want more votes and we won’t sign your constitution if we don’t get them”. There was nothing else to it.
Yes, I meant arguments that weren’t what YJC outlines. Self-interested positions are not usually justified that transparently, at least anymore.
Did white females count as full people for such purposes? As in, yeah, you can’t vote or own property, but you’re not counted as zero or 3/5ths of a person, right?
Gender wasn’t an issue at which political tension existed between the states. Abolition most certainly was, even then.
I don’t quite understand what you are saying here.
Slave had no votes - not even 3/5s of a vote per slave. What the Three-Fifths Compromise did was count 3/5ths of the slaves as “population” when deciding how many representatives (House of Representatives # of delegates for each state is determined by the state’s population). It was the slave-holding states who wanted them to be counted fully - because then the slave-holding state got more representatives in the House.
But the representatives were still elected by whatever the electoral laws of any given state were.
My point is, I can easily imagine a slave-owner reacting with genuine surprise to the idea of counting his slave as 3/5ths of a person, or not at all.
Picture it: you tell him you’re going to count his daughter as a whole person, even though she can’t vote or own property or sign a contract, and the idea of her serving as a lawyer or a military officer or whatever is laughable; he nods in agreement; you tell him you’re going to count his wife as a whole person, likewise; and then you say you won’t count the young slave woman he owns at all, and he says wait, what?
As I never tire of pointing out, the 3/5 ratio first arose in the context of taxation, not representation. The issue arose when the unicameral Confederation Congress, in 1783, considered amending the Articles of Confederation to allow Congress to levy taxes directly upon the American people. Nobody would accept such a proposal unless a fair allocation among the states could be guaranteed in advance, so Congress proposed that any tax levied would have to be proportional to population.
This immediately forced the issue, what about slaves? Most northern states still had slavery in 1783, but the South had many more slaves. The debate at this point had nothing to do with rights or representation (each state had one vote in the Confederation Congress), but rather with the wealth-generating capacity of slaves versus free persons. Congress settled on 3/5 as a crude estimate that the average slave generated 3/5 as much wealth as the average free person.
This estimate accords surprisingly well with modern econometric estimates. In one sense of course it is an indictment of slavery, as less productive than free labor, but the South was willing to make that indictment in return for lower taxes. Congress passed the proposed Amendment with the 3/5 ratio, but it failed of ratification by the states.
Thus the Constitutional Convention did not take up the issue de novo in 1787. They had the earlier debate as background. The Convention was working in the double context of taxation and representation, since one House of Congress would be based on population, and direct taxes would again be based on population. More representation was good; more taxes were bad; so the debate was not a simple “more (or less) is better”.
As it turned out, there wasn’t much of a debate. Carrying 3/5 forward for both purposes (taxation and representation) was the path of least resistance.
The South got the better of this bargain. They gained representation for 3/5 of their slaves through the Civil War, but paid little in direct taxes, which were levied only three times in American history. (During the Quasi-War with France, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, and on that latter occasion the South wasn’t paying.)
White females (and children of either gender) counted as a full person for determining population. But this was the same in both North & South, so not an issue.
This is silly. The entire argument of the Southerners was that slaves were property, not human beings at all.
And that’s exactly where the need for a compromise came from. Except that it wasn’t during the Constitutional debates, but those for the Articles of Confederation.
The slave-owners objected taxing slaves as property. Now just substitute representatives for taxes in that statement and you get 1787. By counting slaves as numbers (not humans - numbers) they could get more representation in Congress. Only in Congress and only as a state. No local municipality cared about the slave/white person ratio.
Today’s thinking, which talks about a black being three-fifths of a white, totally misrepresents both sides of the original. Nobody then ever thought that way, and certainly the percentage was happenstance. The South just wanted slavery to benefit their side no matter what the issue was, and dragged their heels until they got most of what they wanted. Slaves being people was never part of the consideration. Women were never part of the consideration, either. It didn’t matter whether they could vote in federal elections. They were people; blacks and Indians were not.
We do not think in any of these terms today so most people get this whole argument wrong. It’s not what you think it was.
I see Freddy the Pig snuck in while I was making a long-winded argument. I mostly agree except for the 3/5 ratio which was not based in any actual thing except the South making sure they got a bit more than the North.
I’m – look, I don’t want to be That Guy Who Sticks Up For Slaveowners, but I’m honestly just not getting it. As you say, in both the North and the South, a female was treated as a pathetic inferior who of course didn’t get the rights of a white man, and yet of course counted as a full person for that determination anyway…
…so if a Northerner then asked, Say, what of those other pathetic inferiors, who likewise can’t vote or own property or any one of a hundred other things? – well, I’d expect the Southerner to say Why the heck wouldn’t we count each of them as a full person? Isn’t that, y’know, what we do with pathetic inferiors who can’t vote or own property? How is this even a question? I thought the one thing North & South could agree on is that we so count pathetic inferiors who lack such rights!
I guess they cared more about politics than principles. The philosophy behind their positions didn’t interest them much - all they wanted to know was how many people they had in Congress, and how much taxes they had to pay.
The driving question in politics has always been, not “Is it right or wrong?”, but rather, “What’s in it for me?”.
The pro-slavery side pretty consistently argued that slaves were people, just that they were allegedly inferior people. Thus, the 1798 Constitution of Georgia, the 1845 Constitution of Texas, and the 1861 Constitution of Alabama all provided that you couldn’t just kill or maim a slave (with a common loophole to this common protection that such protections didn’t apply in case of “insurrection”; and Georgia in 1798 added that if you accidentally killed a slave in the course of “giving such slave moderate correction” that was OK as well). Texas and Alabama both guaranteed that slaves would have the right to trial by jury if accused of serious crimes. (A white jury, natch.) The 1861 Alabama Constitution provided that “The humane treatment of slaves shall be secured by law” and the 1845 Texas Constitution went into some detail about the whole thing:
Claims that slavery was “mutually beneficial to both bond and free” (Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union) and that abolitionists sought “not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better” (Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union) were a also a very common part of pro-slavery ideology.
Except that nobody thought that way. Nobody had ever thought that way. The U.S. didn’t invent the concept of a census; they had been around since forever. A census counted all the people in an area. Not superior people and inferior people. People. Men, woman, and children.
Slaves were property. Not inferior people, although they were obviously inferior. Property. Free blacks were counted in a census because their status had changed from property to people. Inferiority of a person is not a concept that is relevant to a census.
Note that “Indians not taxed” were also excluded. Just as there could not be taxation with representation there also could not be representation without taxation. If Indians wanted to be exempt from taxes, they had to accept that they couldn’t vote or be represented in Congress. This should have worked for slaves as well; slaves were also not taxed and for that reason shouldn’t have been represented. The South just wanted to have their cake and eat it too.
MEBuckner, saying that the South wanted to have their cake and eat it too applies to every aspect of their relationship to slavery. What they said as propaganda mattered little as long as they did whatever they pleased in reality. Whoops, I accidentally whipped a slave to death during moderate correction so it doesn’t count is so transparent a dodge that no one can seriously make a case for personhood. In fact, I’m not aware of more than the barest handful of cases for which a slave-owner was punished concomitantly with the same offense against a free white.
Southerners had supple minds and pliable morals. They could justify anything with high-sounding words. That’s hardly unique in history but we shouldn’t give them points for their hypocrisy.