“Yes, let’s just stop spinning it, the 3/5ths Compromise, so ignorantly attributed to “racist” southerners and demagogued to infinity, was a compromise insisted upon by northern interests, who did not want slaves counted as fully human in order to prevent Congressional reapportionment from shifting political power to the south.”
Why is it that the Southern States who wanted slaves to be counted as a whole person did not want to extend voting rights to those persons?
My goodness, we've got a live one here, zooming back in his wacky little wayback machine freighted with modern biases and assuming anachronistically that everybody had voting rights in the antebellum era.
Who had voting rights and who did not, trumandogz? And, why? Did noncitizens? Did women? Did the newly naturalized? Did even the unlanded, owning no property, in many instances? What were people living under bondage in your mind trumandogz, citizens? Was this a uniquely southern American concept, in all the world? Where did it come from and who practiced it? And, when and where has it fully and finally been put to an end?
Your strange skewing of history via the lense of current law and societal taboo is known as "historicism," and while you're not alone, you're one of the primary purveyors of such on FR. You'll continue to not have a clue so long as you continue on your Quixotic way in believing this garbage.
It wasn’t just blacks that couldn’t vote, you had to be male and a land owner....although I don’t know about the blacks that held slaves themselves...
One thing at a time.
Most voting privileges were reserved for landowners.
You are turning history upside down. Under the Constitution the more heads a state could count, the more representatives in congress it would have. Those opposed to slavery argued that slaves should not count since they were represented. The large slave holding states argued that everyone should count. The compromise reached in the Constitutional Convention was to count slaves as 3/5 of a person.
BUT........... that 3/5 number had a history.
Only four years earlier in 1783 an amendment to the Articles of Confederation was proposed to change the basis for determining the wealth of each state, and hence its tax obligations, from real estate to total population. At that time, the large slave states argued that slaves should not count. The other states argued that everyone should count.
A compromise was reached that called for counting slaves as 3/5 of a person. The amendment eventually failed falling two states short of the unanimous approval required for amending the Articles of Confederation (New Hampshire and New York were opposed). But all of the large slave states supported it.
So when it came to paying taxes on their 'chattel property' they did not want them counted. But when that same chattel could mean more power in Congress, they wanted slaves counted. And in both instances, they were willing to go with the 3/5 count.
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”
by:
Abraham Lincoln
(1809-1865) 16th US President
Source:
Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
(The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.)