This video tells the story of the Three-Fifths Compromise by wrapping it in a secondary story involving Emory University president James Wagner. Why is he relevant? Probably the objective is to portray universities as bastions of liberal indoctrination and political correctness. For me personally, I found that part distracting and irrelevant.
At any rate, here’s the text of the Compromise:
As you can see, the Three-Fifths Compromise dealt with the apportionment of representatives and taxes. Counting slaves as full persons would have given the South more representation in the House of Representatives, but at the same time it would have cost them more in taxes. Counting each slave as three-fifths of a person for both purposes provided conditions each side could live with.
Though, at one point Carol Swain asserts:
This is misleading in that gives the impression that the compromise was engineered by the North and the South somehow capitulated, when in fact the compromise was fairly reached by both sides as a balance between the dual pressures of more representation and more taxes. In reading the text of the compromise up above, is there anything “anti-slavery” that jumps out at you? Probably not.
That said, one could argue that since the South did not count their slaves as full persons, this gave them less representation in Congress, and hence less power to create even more slave states than were ultimately created (fifteen by the start of the Civil War), but this is pure speculation. The truth is we simply don’t know what would have happened if slaves had been counted as full persons or had not been counted at all.
You must be logged in to post comments.
To write and submit your own review, see Contribute a Review.