Thread by @studentactivism

Remember that the three-fifths compromise wasn't a compromise about the rights of enslaved people—enslaved people were considered zero fifths of a person under it, not three.

It was about how much extra power slaveowners would be given compared to OTHER WHITE PEOPLE.

Under the three-fifths compromise, a white person in states where slavery was legal counted as more of a person for the purposes of representation than a white person in a state where it was illegal.

Every once in a while one of my students will say "slaves only counted as three-fifths of a person," and I'll just stop the class dead and say "That's not true. The truth is actually much much worse than that" and then go on from there.

It's just so revealing as to what was going on in this country was at the founding. That the big representation debate around slavery ultimately centered on how much being a slaveowner entitled you to disenfranchise other white people. Not whether, but how much.

It's like the fact that for decades it was legal in the United States for slaveowners to sell their own children.

And that a not-insignificant number of them did just that.

We are so far away from an actual national reckoning with this country's past.

Someone's in my mentions saying that this was really about achieving balance between the regions, but that's exactly the point—you don't get "balance" in representation by disenfranchising some people and superfranchising others because of their ideologies.

The three-fifths compromise granted political power to slaveowners in the face of the fact that they were an electoral minority, even among white men. It gave them political power even when they were outvoted, and at the expense of those who outvoted them.

The effect of that "compromise" was to disenfranchise white men who didn't own slaves, in service of perpetuating the institution of slavery and all its horrors.

It was a compromise between people who wanted to own other people as property (who were given more power than could be justified in an electoral democracy) and the people who didn't (given less), on the backs of the people who were owned as property (given none).

There are people in the United States who believe that they, by virtue of their ideology, deserve more power, more votes, more representation than their opponents. And there are people who believe that all Americans should have the vote, and that all votes should count equally.

The divide is stark. And it has its roots deep in the ugly history of the country.

One thing that's interesting about the responses to this thread is the number of people saying "well, the slaveowners wanted slaves to count fully, so this was a compromise." As if that's a reasonable, sensible, or good-faith thing for them to have wanted.

Slaveowners didn't want enslaved people to be counted as people for purposes of representation because they thought that was a reasonable principle of counting. They wanted it because doing it would give them more power than they could win through democratic means.

And describing unreasonable things as if they were reasonable is no way out of the mess we're in.