Three-fifths compromise
|
|
The Three-Fifths Compromise (1787) was a compromise between southern and northern states during the Constitutional Convention in which each slave counted as three-fifths of a person regarding both the distribution of taxes and the apportionment of the members of the United States House of Representatives and the U.S. Electoral College (through a census). The compromise was based on the belief that a slave was supposedly three-fifths as economically productive as a white.
It should be noted that since slaves could not vote, the main benefit of counting any portion of the slave population for the purposes of apportionment fell to the slave-holding class. In other words, even if each slave was counted as a full person, it would only increase the political power of the slave-holding states in the House of Representatives, which would presumably be to the further detriment of the slaves themselves.
Following the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the three-fifths clause was finally repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (1868).