OK, fine...looks like I drew the short straw today, so here's why DDS is wrong. Again. As Always. *Puts on Historian Hat* THREAD INCOMING
1. Some background: the 3/5 Compromise is in Art. 1, sec. 2 of the Constitution, in the section on how representation would be apportioned among the states in the new House of Representatives, the seats in which wld be alloted by population.
2. The language reads as follows. Note the avoidance of the word "slave"--the Constitution scrupulously avoids that word throughout. Some people argue that means the Constitution didn't really protect slavery. Those people are wrong. 
3. The key question for southern delegates was how to count population so as to avoid being overwhelmed in the new government by the more populous northern states, whose populations were also growing much faster than those in the south. Why the fixation on this disparity?
4. In the Constitutional Convention, NC's Hugh Willliamson put it most succintly. A northern majority in the new legislature could potentially restrict or even abolish slavery: "the Southern Interest must be extremely endangered" if that would become the case, he said.
5. On July 12, SC's Pierce Butler made it even plainer: "The security the Southn. States want, is that their negroes may not be taken from them, which some gentlemen, within or without doors, have a very good mind to do." Butler accused the northern delegates, and the North+
6. of wanting to do exactly that, to cripple the south's wealth, which was rooted in slave "property" and staple-crop agriculture carried out by enslaved labor. Southern delegates argued that their property deserved representation in a govt dedicated to protecting property rights
7. Northern delegates weren't buying it, however. NJ's William Paterson asked "Has a man in Virga. a number of votes in proportion to the number of his slaves?" [July 9]. Of course, the southern delegates would have answered this in the affirmative.
8. Again, Pierce Butler: "the labour of a slave in South Carolina was as productive and valuable as that of a freeman in Massachusetts" and thus deserved to be equally represented in a govt "instituted principally for the protection of property."
9. Northern delegates wondered why only this particular form of property deserved representation. Why not "horses or oxen to the north?" asked MA's Elbridge Gerry on July 11. But for southerners, counting slaves for representative apportionment was essential to the new govt.
10. This was not due to any sense that enslaved people were human, or deserved any rights. In asserting this D'Souza is flat-out wrong, and clearly hasn't read or doesn't care about any of the documents from either the convention or ratification debates.
11. The southern delegates wanted to use any measure they could to preserve some sort of population parity with the northern states, for as long as they possibly could. They were quite clear that the protection of their "peculiar institution" was at the heart of their proposals.
12. Even James Madison noted "that the States were divided into different intersts not by their difference of size, but by other circumstances; the most materiakl of which resulted partly from climate, but principally from their having or not having slaves." [June 30].
13. That seems pretty clear, no? Ultimately, the South was not able to get enslaved people counted as the equivalent of free people for apportionment, and a compromise was struck, using a 3/5 taxation ratio left over from the Articles of Confederation period.
14. It's worth pointing out that the deep south delegates in particular--Charles Pinckney and Pierce Butler from SC and GA's Abraham Baldwin--were furious, and fought this compromise tooth and nail. They even threatened walking out of the convention.
15. It was in part to appease them that we see other compromises to protect slaveholders' interests (the fugitive slave clause, the prohibition on ending the slave trade for at least 20 years). Wherever the Constitution deals directly w/ slavery, it's from a proslavery stance.
16. So the effort to count slaves as "full people" by southerners was in no way an acknowledgement of Blacks' rights or even humanity. It was a nakedly sectional attempt to modify population-based apportionment. It was anti-democratic, and it worked exactly as designed.
17. The extra seats southern states got in the House of Reps gave the region extra votes in the Electoral College, & likely explain why Jefferson beat Adams in the narrowly-contested election of 1800. This is part of what abolitionists meant when they talked abt "The Slave Power"
18. To argue that southern whites swanted to count slaves as "full people" because that's how they viewed them is just plain wrong. It ignores everything these southern founders themselves said. It's willfully ignorant of how slavery & political power actually worked in this era
19. But we already know that anything D'Souza tweets about US History is wrong--it's just a matter of how much, tbh. He's not going to pay attention to stuff like "evidence," but it's still important to go on record whenever this crap bubbles up from the fever swamps of his mind.
20. [all quotes from Madison's notes on the Constitutional Debates--you can find them all over online--here's a version at the Internet Open Archive: archive.org/details/jamesm…] /end
