Why is 3 5 compromise important

How successful was Washington's presidency? Who said "Give me liberty or give me death! How did the opinions of Jefferson and Hamilton regarding the public debt differ? 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. 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. We cannot overlook the strong racial undertones of their worldview, and we cannot ignore how these perspectives impacted the lives of so many Americans starting in and continuing to today.

Constitution is a document that evolves with the times. Constitutional inadequacies and societal injustices are challenged, and social progress is the result. Instead of reverence for this brilliant document that ensures our rights, it is attacked by some as a severely flawed and even a racist contract.

One of the most widely used means to defame the Constitution is to manipulate perception of the three-fifths compromise. Agenda-driven academicians and committed ideologues routinely state the U.

Constitution only recognizes blacks as three-fifths of a person. No context is given. This often-repeated falsehood foments disrespect of the Constitution and contempt for the founders who authored it. Article I, Section 2 of the U. The Southern states wanted to count the entire slave population.