History of the United States I / Unit 7 USH1 0928 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Slavery Compromises
The idea
The three-fifths formula was not invented at the Convention. From seventeen seventy-five the Second Continental Congress had required states to fund the war by taxation based on total population including enslaved people, and states consistently failed to meet the requisitions. By April seventeen eighty-three the Confederation Congress amended the formula, counting enslaved populations as three-fifths of the White population, which gave slaveholders significant tax relief. Delegates adopted the identical formula in the summer of seventeen eighty-seven. Article 1 Section 2 apportions representatives and direct taxes 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. Enslavers argued their enslaved residents should count toward representation because slavery imposed great burdens deserving special consideration.
In practice
Gouverneur Morris opposing slavery's inclusion and opposing even the use of the word in the framework, which is why the document never says it.
Where people slip
Three things to hold together. First, a tax formula built to reduce what slaveholders owed was reused as a representation formula that increased what they controlled, and the effect was substantial political advantage gained by counting three-fifths of their human property. Second, northern delegates accepted it because the Northwest Ordinance had prohibited slavery in the northwestern territories, balancing slave and free states. Third, on the Atlantic trade the delegates deferred rather than resolved, writing that it shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year eighteen oh eight, after which South Carolina withdrew its stronger fugitive slave proposal. These clauses were checked against the Avalon Project for substance before this entry was drafted.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it · Sources for History of the United States I