@gcvrsa

1 year ago

The so-called three-fifths compromise is widely misunderstood by modern readers. What it actually did was to limit the power of the slave states, because had the entire populations of slaves been counted for the purposes of apportionment, the slave states would thereby have had many more seats in the legislature. The populations of enslaved people in the slave states were a huge proportion of the total population—in 1790 making up more than 1/3 the total population of the South—but those enslaved were not granted any power to vote or hold office, so counting slaves as full people would have resulted in that many more white men in office. The compromise was necessary, because had the slave populations not been counted, at all, the slave states would simply have refused the ratify the Constitution, and if the slave populations has been counted fully, the free states would have refused to ratify the Constitution. Now, one can certainly argue that perhaps the Constitution should never have been ratified, and that is certainly an opinion one can hold, but it is a not an opinion which is relevant to the actual history, and no one can say how much longer slavery would have persisted without it. Additionally, it needs to be recognized that Madison and the other Framers very specifically did not use the word "slavery" anywhere in the Constitution, precisely so that it could not later be used as evidence that the Constitution permitted slavery. Lysander Spooner famously wrote an entire book on this subject, called "The Unconstitutionality of Slavery" (1845), in which he argues correctly that the Constitution does not permit slavery. And don't come at me with how the UK banned slavery in 1832, because they only did so by paying 20 million Pounds Sterling to slaveholders as compensation, which amounted to about 40% of the entire budget of His Majesty's Government, and is equivalent to nearly 20 billion GBP, today. A massive amount of debt was incurred to pay that bill, debt which wasn't fully repaid until 2015. The list of beneficiaries of that payment, none of which was made to any enslaved person, lies at the root of the family fortunes of most of Britain's richest families, today. Whatever else we can say about the Constitution, we can say clearly that the slave states entered into the Constitution fully aware and knowing that the intent of the Constitution was to eventually eliminate the practice of slavery. This is obvious from the text of Article I, Section 9, which states that no laws prohibiting the admission of people to the states would be entertained before 1808, and on the very first day of 1808 (actually, it was passed in the Senate on December 17, 1805, passed in the House on February 13, 1807, and signed by President Jefferson on March 2, 1807, to take effect January 1, 1808) that was exactly what they did—ban the further importation of slaves. This history is quite clear that the slaves states went into this knowing full well what the future held. It's also important to note that the "Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves" of 1807 was NOT the first law Congress passed to restrict the slave trade. That was in 1794, the Slave Trade Act of 1794, which prohibited US ships from participating in the slave trade. And it should also be noted that the penalties for violating these laws were extremely stiff, even by the standards of the era.

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