Compare And Contrast The Three Fifths Compromise

As leaders of the nascent nation entered the Constitutional Convention of 1787, they aimed to unify the country under a set of common laws and values. During this process, the delegates were divided on the topic of slavery, in terms of how it would affect the way states were represented in Congress and how states were taxed by the national government. After many proposals, the delegates arrived at the three-fifths compromise, which valued slaves as 3/5th of free persons for the purposes of representation and taxation. If a true compromise is an agreement in which the parties involved make equal concessions, then the three-fifths compromise was not a true compromise because it favored the South by giving it disproportionate power in the national

To unite the elements of the New Jersey and Virginia Plans, Roger Sherman brought forth the Connecticut Compromise. This agreement re-structured the legislative branch of government, in which the upper house consisted of two delegates per states and the lower house was based on the population of the states. Consequently, the Compromise included the three-fifths clause, which stated that population would 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.” By partially valuing slaves in both representation and taxation, the clause aimed to placate both the North and the South. The logic behind this solution was promulgated by James Madison’s when he said, “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.” The three-fifths compromise allowed both sides to benefit, in exchange for some concessions. However, a close examination of the compromise shows that it was not a true

While both the slave and non-slave states were represented equally in the upper house, the slave states had greater representation overall in the lower house. This imbalance had long-lasting implications on the composition of the national government, since the South was granted more representation in the Electoral College. Being able to control the fate of the government outweighed the cost of the extra taxation posed by the three-fifths of the slave population. In addition, the North did not directly benefit from this concession from the South because the increased taxes from the slave states went towards the reserves of the federal government, which served to promote welfare in the nation as a