Three-fifths Compromise

The Three-fifths Compromise, also known as the Constitutional Compromise of 1787, was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in counting a state's total population. This count would determine the number of seats in the House of Representatives, the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated,[1] and how much money the states would pay in taxes. Slaveholding states wanted their entire population to be counted to determine the number of Representatives those states could elect and send to Congress. Free states wanted to exclude the counting of slave populations in slave states, since those slaves had no voting rights. A compromise was struck to resolve this impasse. The compromise counted three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives, effectively giving the Southern states more power in the House relative to the Northern states. It also gave slaveholders similarly enlarged powers in Southern legislatures; this was an issue in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia in 1863. Free black people and indentured servants were not subject to the compromise, and each was counted as one full person for representation.[2]

The Three-fifths Compromise is in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution. It provides:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons [italics added].[3]

In 1868, Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment superseded this clause by providing that members of the House of Representatives "shall be apportioned among the several States" by "counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed."

  1. ^ Article II, section 1, of the U.S. Constitution provides that each state's number of electors shall be "equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in Congress."
  2. ^ Finkelman, Paul, "The Founders and Slavery: Little Ventured, Little Gained", p. 427.
  3. ^ "The Constitution of the United States: A Transcription". National Archives and Records Administration. November 4, 2015. Retrieved October 2, 2020.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.