This essay traces three pivotal legislative compromises on slavery in American history: the Three-Fifths Compromise embedded in the Constitution, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Compromise of 1850. Beginning with the inherent contradiction between the Declaration of Independence's proclamation of equality and the Constitutional counting of enslaved people as three-fifths of a person, the paper argues that each successive compromise deepened rather than resolved the nation's fundamental conflict over slavery. By examining the political tensions between Northern and Southern states, the spread of slavery westward, the Underground Railroad, and the doctrine of Popular Sovereignty, the essay shows how these flawed compromises ultimately set the stage for the Civil War.
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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" — except for Black American men, of course, who are only three-fifths equal, according to the Constitution of the United States. The ringing words about equality, penned by Jefferson — himself a guilty-minded slaveholder — sound far less inspiring when the actual text of the Constitution is held alongside the Declaration of Independence he authored in 1776.
From the very founding of the republic, a fundamental contradiction existed at the heart of American democracy. The nation proclaimed universal liberty while simultaneously encoding the enslavement of human beings into its governing document. Three successive legislative compromises — the Three-Fifths Compromise, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and the Compromise of 1850 — each attempted to manage this contradiction. Each, in turn, made it worse.
The Three-Fifths Compromise sounds bizarre on its surface: it stated that enslaved human beings would count, for purposes of taxation and population counts for the Electoral College, as three-fifths of a person. The conflict reflects one of the central problems of the Constitutional Convention. The convention was torn between the value Southern states placed upon states' rights and the Northern states' desire for a stronger federal government that could curtail the spread of slavery — the South's so-called "peculiar institution" (Slavery Compromises, 2004).
The South believed that slaves should count toward their representation in Congress, even though those slaves were treated as chattel and could not vote. Thus, despite the fact that even the slaveholding Jefferson, along with the other founding fathers, regarded slavery as contradictory to American principles of liberty, the compromise was included to placate the Southern states. As Jefferson himself wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.... The spirit of the Master is abating" (Notes on the State of Virginia; Slavery Compromises, 2004).
Slavery was thus incorporated into the Constitution in a form that was both legally and logically absurd — a compromise that satisfied no one. Even at the time, Jefferson acknowledged the dilemma: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is on one scale, and self-preservation in the other." But because, as Senator Hammond of South Carolina declared, "Cotton is King," the compromise was allowed to stand — at least while America remained, North and South, largely agrarian and thus more sympathetic to Southern economic demands.
While the North and South had been in political conflict over the strength of the federal government from 1776 to 1819, the industrialization of the North and the expansion westward from 1820 to 1850 pushed the two regions further apart. The Missouri Compromise came into being in 1820 when many of the people who had settled that new territory were slave owners who wished to keep their slaves after Missouri became a state, despite Congress's avowed intent to prevent the spread of slavery. It had been argued that even if the Southern economy could not be dismantled, at least the spread of slavery could be curtailed and confined, like a disease, to the southern regions of the country (Bushong, 2004).
Missouri slave owners wanted to keep their slaves as property and also have their territory join the Union as a state. Northerners in Congress refused to accept Missouri as a slave state. To preserve the Union, however, Missouri was allowed to join as a "slave state" while Maine joined as a "free state." The Missouri Compromise was designed to keep the numbers of free and slave states even — but in doing so, it allowed slavery to spread into a new state of the Union (Bushong, 2004).
As Lincoln would later warn, "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free." That warning was brought into sharp relief by the political aftermath of the 1820 compromise. In a nation filled with pro-freedom rhetoric, where certain individuals were deemed simultaneously human and property depending on where they resided, more and more enslaved people felt justified in fleeing the South.
"Escaping bondage and Northern resistance to return laws"
"Popular Sovereignty and the seeds of civil war"
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