Today, I had one of the most interesting conversation with one of my classmates in my American Legal Systems class. He is very conservative. I mean VERY conservative. He believes that the constitution was written in such a way that each of the framers, some slaveholding, and very pious, believed that in 100 years, full rights would be exercised to everyone. He believes that Al Sharpton and Jeremiah Wright have put pressure on African Americans to always vote Democratic. I understood that as a hardcore conservative, that he would make these sort of points. One that got me today was the 3/5ths compromise.
His belief system was this. HE believed that abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates drummed up the three-fifths compromise to encourage slave rights, which would lead to black suffrage. It was amazing how he tried to convince everyone that what most learned since 2nd Grade Social Studies was the other way. Here is the facts.
It was about power. It was by no means necessary about slave rights or suffrage. No. In 1787, there were hardly many metropolitan areas as was in the North. The North was the industrial hub of the nation where manufacturing was king. There were hardly any fertile land for crops to be grown, so it became a place of industry and slavery was limited or not needed. In the South, however, agricultural, sparse land was only there. The population was not dense at all. It was spread out and land was sparingly used. With a small population, means that there are less electoral votes, less representation in the U.S. Congress, thus less political power in the south, where the North could forcefully impose anything they wanted on the South. Thus, slaves were counted as 3/5ths. There were loads of slaves in the South and could be used to bolster power in the South.
Annotation:
The Constitution was a document based upon compromise: between larger and smaller states, between proponents of a strong central government and those who favored strong state governments, and, above all, between northern and southern states. Of all the compromises on which the Constitution rested, perhaps the most controversial was the Three-Fifths Compromise, an agreement to count three-fifths of a state's slaves in apportioning Representatives, Presidential electors, and direct taxes.
The three-fifths figure was the outgrowth of a debate that had taken place within the Continental Congress in 1783. The Articles of Confederation had apportioned taxes not according to population but according to land values. The states consistently undervalued their land in order to reduce their tax burden. To rectify this situation, a special committee recommended apportioning taxes by population. The Continental Congress debated the ratio of slaves to free persons at great length. Northerners favored a 4-to-3 ratio, while southerners favored a 2-to-1 or 4-to-1 ratio. Finally, James Madison suggested a compromise: a 5-to-3 ratio. All but two states--New Hampshire and Rhode Island--approved this recommendation. But because the Articles of Confederation required unanimous agreement, the proposal was defeated. When the Constitutional Convention met in 1787, it adopted Madison's earlier suggestion.
The taxes that the Three-Fifths Compromise dealt with were "direct" taxes, as opposed to excise or import taxes. It was not until 1798 that Congress imposed the first genuine direct taxes in American history: a tax on dwelling-houses and a tax on slaves aged 12 to 50.
The Three-Fifths Compromise greatly augmented southern political power. In the Continental Congress, where each state had an equal vote, there were only five states in which slavery was a major institution. Thus the southern states had about 38 percent of the seats in the Continental Congress. Because of the 1787 Three-Fifths Compromise, the southern states had nearly 45 percent of the seats in the first U.S. Congress, which took office in 1790.
It is ironic that it was a liberal northern delegate, James Wilson of Pennsylvania, who proposed the Three-Fifths Compromise, as a way to gain southern support for a new framework of government. 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.
Over the long term, the Three-Fifths Compromise did not work as the South anticipated. Since the northern states grew more rapidly than the South, by 1820, southern representation in the House had fallen to 42 percent. Nevertheless, from Jefferson's election as President in 1800 to the 1850s, the three-fifths rule would help to elect slaveholding Presidents. Southern political power increasingly depended on the Senate, the President, and the admission of new slaveholding states.
Thats the facts. I don't know where he came up with that, but I'd like to see it.
The Achilles' heel of American conservatism is that it has rarely if ever been on the positive side of history regarding issues of race, gender, and civil rights in general. This is very much a sore point with conservatives today. They will often remind you that the Republican party freed the slaves while the Democratic party worked for the most part to perpetuate slavery. This would be a meaningful point if not for the fact that 150 years ago; the Republicans were the liberals and the Democrats were the conservatives of their time. If you were a radical abolitionist, you were probably aligned with the Republican party or one of its allies. If you were a slave holder or sympathetic to slavery, you were probably a Democrat. This status-quo did not begin to change substantially until the beginning of the civil rights era in the mid 20th century.
ReplyDeleteLook at it another way: on March 7,1965, a day known as "Bloody Sunday," a civil rights march for African American voting rights in Selma Alabama confronted state and local police at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. On one side the bridge stood the civil rights protesters. They wanted change. We typically call people who want change "liberals." On the other side of the bridge were the police and state troopers. They wanted to keep things the way they were. We typically call people who want to keep things the way they are "conservatives." So there you have it; conservatives stood on one side of the bridge and liberals stood on the other. Conservatism was on the wrong side of the bridge that day, and they were on the wrong side of history as well. They have been trying to find a way to squirm out of such unpleasant historical realities ever since. So don't be too surprised when you're in a class and some conservative Glenn Beck wanna-be tries to rewrite American history for the convenience of "white-washing" unpleasant historical facts (no pun intended). That's just how they roll.