What was determined by the three fifths compromise

However, soon after the meeting, the delegates realized amending the Articles of Confederation would not be enough. Instead, they needed to create a new document, which meant building a new government from the ground up. With so much at stake, reaching an agreement that stood a chance of being ratified by the states meant the many competing interests would need to find a way to work together. The main factions that existed at the Constitutional Convention were large states vs.

Southern states, and East vs. The large state versus small state fight broke out early on in the debate, when the delegates were working to determine the framework of the new government.

This plan received support from delegates looking to create a strong national government that would also limit the power of any one person or branch, but it was primarily supported by larger states since their larger populations would allow them more representatives in Congress, which meant more power.

Smaller states opposed this plan because they felt it denied them equal representation; their smaller population would prevent them from having a meaningful impact in Congress. Their alternative was to create a Congress where each state would have one vote, no matter the size.

Differing opinions as to which plan was best brought the convention to a halt and put the fate of the assembly in jeopardy. However, Roger Sherman, one of the representatives from Connecticut, stepped in and offered a solution that blended the priorities of both sides. This appeased the small states because it gave them what they saw as equal representation, but what was really a much louder voice in the government.

Reaching this agreement allowed the Constitutional Convention to move forward, but almost as soon as this compromise was reached, it became clear that there were other issues dividing the delegates. One such issue was slavery, and just like in the days of the Articles of Confederation, the question was about how slaves should be counted.

But this time, it was not about how slaves would impact tax obligations. Instead, it was about something arguably much more important: their impact on representation in Congress.

And the Southern states, which had — during the Confederation years — opposed counting slaves into the population since it would have cost them money now supported the idea because doing so would grant them something even better than money: power. The Northern states, seeing this and not liking it one bit, took the opposing view and fought against slaves being counted as part of the population at all.

After the Great Compromise helped settle the debate between large and small states, it became clear that the differences that existed between the Northern and the Southern states would be just as difficult, if not more so, to overcome. And it was largely due to the issue of slavery. In the North, most people had moved on from the use of slaves. Indentured servitude still existed as a way to pay debts, but wage labor was becoming more and more the norm, and with more opportunities for industry, the wealthy class saw this as the best way to move forward.

Many Northern states still had slavery on the books, but this would change in the following decade, and by the early s, all states north of the Mason-Dixon Line the southern border of Pennsylvania had banned human bondage. In the Southern states, slavery had been an important part of the economy since the early years of colonialism, and it was poised to become even more so.

Southern plantation owners needed slaves to work their land and produce the cash crops they exported all over the world. However, even in , there were some rumblings hinting of Northern hopes of abolishing slavery. Although, at the time, no one saw this as a priority, as the formation of a strong union amongst the states was far more important from the perspective of the White people in charge.

As the years passed, though, the differences between the two regions would only grow wider due to the dramatic differences in their economies and ways of life. In normal circumstances, this might not have been a big deal.

After all, in a democracy, the whole point is to put competing interests in a room and force them to make a deal. But because of the Three Fifths Compromise, the Southern states were able to gain an inflated voice in the House of Representatives, and because of the Great Compromise, it also had more of a voice in the Senate — a voice it would use to have a tremendous impact on the early history of the United States. Each word and phrase included in the U.

S Constitution is important and has, at one moment or another, guided the course of US history. After all, the document remains the longest-lasting government charter of our modern world, and the framework it lays out has touched the lives of billions of people since it was first ratified in The language of the Three fifths Compromise is no different.

However, since this agreement dealt with the issue of slavery, it has had unique consequences, many of which are still present today. The most immediate impact of the Three Fifths Compromise was that it inflated the amount of power the Southern states had, largely by securing more seats for them in the House of Representantives.

This became apparent in the first Congress — Southern states received 30 of the 65 seats in the House of Representatives. Had the Three Fifths Compromise not been enacted and had representation been determined by counting only the free population, there would have only been a total of 44 seats in the House of Representatives, and only 11 of them would have been Southern.

In other words, the South controlled just under half the votes in the House of Representatives thanks to the Three Fifths Compromise, but without it, it would have controlled just a quarter.

Combined, these two factors made Southern politicians much more powerful in the US government than they really had any right to be. Of course, they could have freed slaves, given them the right to vote, and then used that expanded population to gain more influence over the government using an approach that was significantly more moral….

To take things one step further, consider that these slaves — who were being counted as part of the population, albeit only three fifths of it — were denied every possible form of freedom and political participation. As a result, counting them sent more Southern politicians to Washington, but — because slaves were denied the right to participate in government — the population these politicians represented was actually a rather small group of people known as the slaveholder class.

They were then able to use their inflated power to promote slaveholder interests and make the issues of this small percentage of American society a big part of the national agenda, limiting the ability of the federal government to even begin addressing the heinous institution itself. But as the nation expanded, it was forced to confront the issue over and over again. Several decades of this intensified things, and eventually led the United States into the deadliest conflict in its history, the American Civil War.

After the war, the 13th Amendment of effectively wiped out the three fifths compromise by outlawing slavery. But when the 14th amendment was ratified in , it officially repealed the three fifths compromise. S Constitution has led many historians to wonder how history would have played out differently had it not been enacted.

This is because the US president has always been elected through the Electoral College, a body of delegates that forms every four years with the sole purpose of choosing a president. In the College, each state had and still has a certain number of votes, which is determined by adding the number of senators two to the number of representatives determined by population from each state. The Three-Fifths Compromise made it so that there were more Southern electors than there would have been had slave population not been counted, giving Southern power more influence in presidential elections.

Others have pointed to major events that helped exacerbate the sectional differences that eventually brought the nation to civil war and argue that the outcome of these events would have been considerably different had it not been for the Three-Fifths Compromise.

However, as mentioned, this is all just speculation, and we should be cautious about making these types of claims. S Constitution not been written to give the South a small but meaningful edge in the distribution of power.

While the Three-Fifths Compromise certainly had an immediate influence on the course of the US, perhaps the most startling impact of the agreement stems from the inherent racism of the language, the effect of which is still being felt today.

But the prospect of union between the states was more important than anything, meaning the plight of the Negro was not of much concern to the wealthy, White men who formed the elite political class of the newly-formed United States of America. Historians point to this type of thinking as proof of the White supremacist nature of the American Experiment, and also as a reminder of how much of the collective myth surrounding the founding of the United States and its rise to power is told from an inherently racist perspective.

This is important because it is not discussed, in most conversations, about how to move forward. White Americans continue to choose ignorance of the reality that the country was built on a foundation of slavery. Ignoring this truth makes it difficult to address the most pressing concerns facing the nation in the present day. Specifically, population was a way of determining how to apportion federal representatives, electors, and taxes.

Today , it has no modern implications. Three - Fifths Compromise. The Three - Fifths Compromise was a compromise reached between the northern and southern states of the U. The compromise was reached during a debate over whether or not slaves should be counted when a state was determining its total number of residents for legislative and tax purposes.

The Three - Fifths Compromise. The Three - Fifths Compromise outlined the process for states to count slaves as part of the population in order to determine representation and taxation for the federal government.

The three - fifths clause is perhaps the most misunderstood provision of the U. The clause provides that representation in Congress will be based on "the whole Number of free Persons" and " three fifths of all other Persons. The Northern states didn't like the idea of the Southern states gaining so many delegates, so the three fifths compromise was struck - each slave will only count as three fifths a person, as to give the Southerners delegates that reflect higher populations, but a proportion that isn't skewed because the Southerners.

Southern states had wanted representation apportioned by population; after the Virginia Plan was rejected, the Three - Fifths Compromise seemed to guarantee that the South would be strongly represented in the House of Representatives and would have disproportionate power in electing Presidents. The ratification of the United States Constitution was the subject of intense debate between and Article I, Section 2 of the U.

The Three - Fifths compromise gave southern states disproportionate representation in the House of Representatives relative to free states , thereby helping the southern states to preserve slavery. The Constitution of the United States established America's national government and fundamental laws, and guaranteed certain basic rights for its citizens.

Under America's first governing document, the Articles of Confederation, the national government was weak and states operated like independent countries.

A special committee worked out another compromise : Congress would have the power to ban the slave trade, but not until The convention voted to extend the date to A final major issue involving slavery confronted the delegates. Southern states wanted other states to return escaped slaves. Though the word " slavery " does not appear in the Constitution , the issue was central to the debates over commerce and representation.

Southern delegates argued that their slaves counted in the population, yielding them more Representatives. Northern delegates countered that slaves were property and should not be counted at all. Who were the the 55 Delegates to the Convention? The delegates to the Constitutional Convention did not represent a cross-section of America.

The Convention included no women, no slaves, no Native Americans or racial minorites, no laborers. At the time of the of the convention, states' populations varied, but not by nearly as much as they do today. As a result, one of the main lingering political effects of the Great Compromise is that states with smaller populations have a disproportionately bigger voice in the nation's Congress.