Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I’ve written about this before, so maybe I’m missing something, but I’m always a little confused when people point to the 3/5s compromise as the best evidence that the constitution was racist/did nothing about slavery/denied black people citizenship. For example, in making an otherwise unobjectionable point that the Constitution, as ratified, did not ensure the liberties and rights for African Americas, Adam Serwer says “The Constitution’s acceptance of slavery, and its valuation of slaves as “three-fifths” of a person, was a fundamental flaw that contradicted the very principles outlined in the Constitution” 

Sure, the valuation of slaves as 3/5s of a person for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House is a good symbol for what was going on, but in reality, it doesn’t mean much.

That’s because it was the Southern slaveholders who wanted slaves to count as a whole person so they could get more seats in the House and maintain national legislative support for slavery. The Northerners, though hardly angels on the slavery front, wanted them to count as zero to get more political power for themselves. If we were to imagine a world in which the South got what it wanted – individual slaves counting as one – we would lose a powerful anecdote for the legalized erasure of blacks in pre Civil War America, but it wouldn’t have actually improved the legal status for antebellum African Americans. (even if they counted as one, they wouldn’t have been able to vote). If anything, antebellum America would have been a much better place had slaves counted for zero. From Wikipedia:

For example, in 1793 slave states would have been apportioned 33 seats in the House of Representatives had the seats been assigned based on the free population; instead they were apportioned 47. In 1812, slaveholding states had 76 instead of the 59 they would have had; in 1833, 98 instead of 73. As a result, southerners dominated the Presidency, the Speakership of the House, and the Supreme Court in the period prior to the Civil War.^[5]

Historian Garry Wills has postulated that without the additional “slave” votes, Jefferson would have lost the presidential election of 1800. Also, “…slavery would have been excluded fromMissouri…Jackson’s Indian removal policy would have failed…the Wilmot Proviso would have banned slavery in territories won from Mexico….the Kansas-Nebraska bill would have failed….”^[5] However, other historians have criticized Wills’s analysis as simplistic.^[6] For example, while the three-fifths compromise could be seen to favor Southern states (which generally had larger slave populations), the Connecticut compromise tended to favor the Northern states (which were generally smaller). Support for the new Constitution rested on the balance of these sectional interests.^[7]

Of course, there are limits to what this type of counterfactual can explain or illuminate, but it shows that the 3/5s compromise was hardly the be-all end-all of antebellum legal racism.

What’s weird is that I’m sure Adam Serwer knows all the history behind the 3/5s compromise, but uses it as an example anyway.