North-South Issues: A Final Note on the Three-Fifths Compromise

One final comment should be made about the Three-Fifths Compromise.  I discussed in the previous post how it came about.  The original plan under the Articles of Confederation was for each state to pay a tax quota in proportion to its assessed land values.  When this proved to be impractical, the rule was changed to a tax quota in proportion to population.  That led to a dispute as to whether slaves counted.  Naturally, southern states said they should not and northern states said they should.  As a compromise, the states agreed to count three-fifths of the slaves in each state's tax quota.  The Constitutional Convention then adopted this rule for representation in the House, this time with southern states depending the inclusion of (three-fifths of) slaves, and northern states demanding that they be excluded altogether.  That is the true story of how the three-fifths compromise came about -- including three-fifths of all slaves in representation was the adoption of an earlier compromise to include three-fifths of all slaves in taxation.  The number is perfectly arbitrary -- it just happens to be the number chosen.

This led to two misconceptions about the compromise.  One is that it is based on slaves' dual nature and people and property, or that it treated a slave as three-fifths of a person, and the other that it was intended as a penalty on southern states for holding slaves.  Both are false.

The idea of three-fifths representation as a penalty on the South was not suggested at all at the time, and appears to have originated with abolitionists, especially Frederick Douglass, intent on interpreting the Constitution as an anti-slavery document.  Since southerners had already gotten an exemption from taxes on two-fifths of their slaves, no one suggested including all of them in representation.  The only question was whether some should be included.

As for the idea that this meant a slave was three-fifths of a person, or that it reflected the dual nature of slaves as persons and property, this is also false, but understandable because the misconception originates with Madison and Federalist Paper No. 54. The Federalist Papers were addressed to a New York audience, so Madison was in the awkward position of being a southerner defending slave representation to a northern audience. How does one defend the indefensible? Concealing his southern origins, Madison proposed that some hypothetical southerner might make the following argument:

"We subscribe to the doctrine,'' might one of our Southern brethren observe, "that representation relates more immediately to persons, and taxation more immediately to property, and we join in the application of this distinction to the case of our slaves. But we must deny the fact, that slaves are considered merely as property, and in no respect whatever as persons. The true state of the case is, that they partake of both these qualities: being considered by our laws, in some respects, as persons, and in other respects as property.

In being compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another, the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property. In being protected, on the other hand, in his life and in his limbs, against the violence of all others, even the master of his labor and his liberty; and in being punishable himself for all violence committed against others, the slave is no less evidently regarded by the law as a member of the society, not as a part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property.

The federal Constitution, therefore, decides with great propriety on the case of our slaves, when it views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live; and it will not be denied, that these are the proper criterion; because it is only under the pretext that the laws have transformed the negroes into subjects of property, that a place is disputed them in the computation of numbers; and it is admitted, that if the laws were to restore the rights which have been taken away, the negroes could no longer be refused an equal share of representation with the other inhabitants.

This is not a good argument.  It is not one that will convince anyone today, and it is unlikely that it convinced any of Madison's readers either.  Madison himself admitted that it was "a little strained in some points."  More importantly, it was not an argument that any Southerner made with a straight face.  It may best be seen as a far-fetched hypothetical for how one might possibly defend the indefensible.  However, given the prestige of the Federalist Papers people have sometimes treated this as a serious argument and claimed that the Three-Fifths Compromise treated a slave as 60% of a person, or as somewhere between a person and property.