Three-Fifths Compromise and Slavery at Constitutional Convention 1787

Constitution/Slavery

The Constitutional significance of the Three-Fifths Compromise, an agreement reached at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was enormous at the time and has arguable continued to influence the conduct of American politics and life since then, despite its abolishment with the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1878. Most simply, the Three-Fifths Compromise created a sort of 'double entry bookkeeping' approach to the issue of slavery. The South wanted the slaves to be considered property on the one hand, disallowing them the status of human citizens with a right to vote. On the other hand, the South wanted the saves to be counted when it came time to delivering various benefits such as distribution of taxes and apportionment of representatives in the House of Representatives. Because slaves were considered by their owners to be simple property, the benefits would not accrue to them, but rather to their owners.

Since slaves could not vote, the benefits of counting the slaves a persons for the purposes of government benefits would increase the portion of those benefits received by the Southern slave owners, giving them not only more government support, but more influence in government as well. It could be argued that, wielding that significant amount of power, the slave owners would have felt even less constraint regarding their treatment of the slaves, and the slaves would have suffered even more greatly.

The compromise, counting each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of taxes and apportionment, slightly limited the power wielded by the South, and presumably constrained the less humane slave owners from treating the slaves any worse than they did for fear of losing power if the slave head count decreased.

The Three-Fifths Compromise was not the only instance in which slavery was addressed by the Constitution.

The slave trade formed a continuing reason for dissension between southerners and northerners. In Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, Congress was limited from prohibiting the importation of slaves, at least until 1808. For twenty years, Congress was, by virtue of the Constitution, enjoined from any attempt to limit slave importation. Finally, however, Congress did pass a law outlawing the slave trade as of January 1, 1808.

The final mention of slavery in the Constitution virtually prevented slaves from gaining freedom by escaping to a non-slave state. The Fugitive Slave Clause states that the laws of one state could not excuse a person from "service or labor" in another state; in short, escaped slaves were to be extradited from free states back to slave states because the escapees were not truly human with rights to liberty, but rather property with no rights.