Boy, that dog don’t hunt. They wanted slaves to be treated as capital on the one hand and as some fraction of a human being on the other, depending on which interpretation was most beneficial. Taxes were assessed on property, which also included land, the plantation house, farm animals, etc. etc. But no slaveholder expected that having a nice big mansion would afford you the right to vote twice–so why should owning human property give you that right?
This kind of necessarily involved doublethink on the part of slaveholders, in that slaves were property, not human, but wait, yes they were in terms of political representation. The effect was to make every Southerner’s vote count 1.6x that of a Northerner. It’s a wonder the country held together until 1861.
Right, but land, animals, and mansions weren’t used as the basis for allocating taxes among the states. They were used to assess taxes on individuals, but not to allocate the total among the states. Direct federal taxes involved a two-step process–first divvy the total $ to be raised among the states, then set the rates within each state so that the assessment on individuals within the state added up to the right total. Here is a description of how it worked in 1798.
This may seem loony by today’s standards, when the federal government routinely taxes people without worrying about which state they live in. But it was not loony in the 1780’s. Without this safeguard, no one would have agreed to giving the federal government power to tax at all.
I don’t wish to defend the morality of any of this, but only to point out that there was a logical connection between tax allocation and representation, and that “0 for representation and 1 for tax allocation” would have been a tough sell. Moral, maybe, since it would have hindered slave-heavy states, but not practical in the context of the time.
Clearly, slaves were property, so it might seem logical to suppose that they were obviously considered non-human–that would be logically consistent with the whole “buying and selling” them thing, however monstrous it is to think of looking at a living, breathing, talking, thinking human being and saying “You’re not a person, 'cause I own you”. (And there’s the Zong Massacre, a hideous English legal case from 1781.)
However, at least if you’re talking about American law after the Revolution, it seems slaves were considered to be “people”, even as they were simultaneously considered to be “property”. The Constitution, of course, in all its mealy-mouted antebellum glory, consistently refers to slaves as “persons”–“three fifths of all other Persons”; “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight”; “no Person held to Service or Labour in one State…”
But even the laws of the slave states themselves generally made some provisions for the protection of the most basic rights of slaves. The 1798 Constitution of Georgia provided that
Obviously there were enormous loopholes in these laws–“unless such death should happen by accident in giving such slave moderate correction”; “except in case of insurrection by such slave”–and in practice I don’t know how often whites were prosecuted for killing or maiming slaves in the antebellum South, or how often they were convicted if tried. Still, these laws clearly did not consider slaves to be “non-human”. Texas even declared that
A jury of white men, of course. These same two provisions (against death or dismemberment of slaves, and guaranteeing slaves a trial by jury if accused of serious crimes) can be found in the 1861 Constitution of Alabama, along with a general statement that the “humane treatment of slaves shall be secured by law”.
It was a very consistent feature of pro-slavery propaganda before the war (and even after it) that slaves were better off as slaves–as Texans proclaimed, that the “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery” was “mutually beneficial to both bond and free”. I suppose many of the whites even believed it.
MEBuckner, I like your recent post. I do have a question for you and anyone else. I’ve been researching the 3/5ths clause, and it appears that at some point in history someone was very successful at linking this to “black slaves” or “African Slaves”. I found that it was introduced by a Penn. Delagate. My question is: Was this merely a “Lawyer” type trick to somehow combine the African Slave term to the 3/5ths clause?
What I’m trying to say is that, the statement prior to that in the Constitution applies more to slavery than the latter 3/5ths clause. The statement “including those bound to service for a term of years,” seems to refer to slavery of all. The statement following, “and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons” appears to may have been misrepresented by applying this to slaves in order to draw the focus away from the original intent. Reading quotes by the founders, I believe the intent was to count them as one person as noted in the previous statement. However, many were imprisoned prior to arriving here, so would they count in any situation? Many were in servitude, which in the south they had the right to vote prior to reconstruction, as per questionaire at the Nat. Const. Center in P.A.
To me, the 3/5ths clause more represents those not citizens of the state or the U.S. Now some slaves would fall into that catagory as well, they being non-citizens and being prisoners; just as someone sentenced to prison now may serve in another state and not be a citizen or counted on the census as regular citizens. Also, during that time it many states, cities, and townships passed laws that forbid “non-productive citizens” from entering there jurisdiction; and that if found from where, that state, city, or township could require the area the person was from to provide financial support for them living there.
Anyway, I’ve enjoyed reading these posts, they’ve all been very informative. I prefer to stay focused on the 3/5ths clause, but cannot help thinking that this has been a very successful trick by lawyers or politicians of the time to skewer the attention to the 2nd statement rather than the first. A successful attempt that even presides over the arguement today.
I guess that argument turns on what you consider to be the alternative: Count each slave as a full person, or not at all.
As we’ve long been taught, the really miraculous thing about the Convention was the degree of compromising they did to reconcile competing interests, so determined were they to create a working Union. (Where have we seen any compromising lately?)
(One could argue ad infinitum, I suppose, over just how exactly they settled on the 3/5 number.)
(ETA: I see Freddy the Pig has already addressed that specific.)
As already mentioned, the use of blacks as slaves was damned racist to begin with, however they were counted, and that on top of the ethic depravity of having anybody being slaves.
They all knew at the time, that slavery was a controversial issue, because it definitely already was, and especially the American version of it, and they all seemed to understand that it wasn’t going to be settled easily any time soon. (Great understatement, that.) It’s been suggested that there was a tacit understanding all along to simply kick the can down the road, to leave it to a future generation, and that’s exactly what they did.
Four score and seven years later, it all came to a head, very unpleasantly.
I have no idea what you’re attempting to argue, but the “all other persons” referred to in the 3/5 clause was intended to apply to slaves, and did apply to slaves. This is quite clear from the debates at the time, as well as from common sense. Those “bound to service for a term of years” were indentured servants. Indentured servitude was dying out by 1787, but was not yet completely dead. The clause makes clear that indentured servants are not to be considered enslaved and therefore DO count as full persons.