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.
No sarc. Keep it up. It’s always refreshing to read about the CW in the most anti-pc way.
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Actually, that is pretty much the exact opposite of the truth.
Historicism is a mode of thinking in which the basic significance of specific social context—e.g., time, place, local conditions—is central; whereas the notion of fundamental generalizable immutable laws in the realm of sociology or social behavior tends to be rejected. [Wikipedia]
Someone who makes reference to universal principles in judging the past may be ahistorical or unhistorical, but by definition, he or she can't be a historicist.
But is it ahistorical or unhistorical to point out the contradiction inherent in denying people freedom and the vote and yet counting them to give one's state a greater representation than the number of free, voting people would warrant?
That would have to mean that no one questioned that practice at the time. But clearly people did question the way that a state like South Carolina received extra representatives based on 3/5 of the enslaved half of its population.
It wasn't that they wanted to give slaves the vote. They wanted to bring the states representation in Congress and the electoral college into accord with that part of the population that was actually free and taxpaying.
It was the opponents of slavery who advocated such a course, since it would weaken that institution, but clearly for some people in 19th century America there was something morally questionable about claiming representation based on people one denied freedom to.
So yes, people then and now made appeal to the principles they thought to be universal to attack the 3/5 compromise and what they believed to be the unfair advantage free Southern Whites enjoyed in Congress over and above what their population would entitle them to.
There's nothing unhistorical or ahistorical or historically erroneous in pointing that out or in making the same argument now -- and certainly nothing "historicist" about it.
Karl Popper used the word "historicism" in another sense -- to mean the belief that we could discover iron "laws of history" and run society in accord with them, but that's not relevant here.
After two world wars, "historicism" was associated with Germany and its use of historical relativism as a defense, so it became a dirty word that people associated with wrong thinking about history and morality. But to use it to mean pretty much its exact opposite -- that's something novel.
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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.
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That's not true either. South Carolina and Georgia wanted all of their enslaved population to count when congressional seats were apportioned among the states. The rest of the country wouldn't agree.
It was left to delegates from Virginia and Connecticut and North Carolina to propose other proportions that states could agree on regardless of how many slaves they had had.
South Carolina and Georgia were already committed to slavery and wanted representation based on 100% of their slave population. Most of the Northern states disagreed.
It was the other Southern states, plus Connecticut that pushed through the 3/5 compromise (with Massachusetts divided on some of the votes and Pennsylvania supporting the compromise on one key vote).
Whether you want to view this as South against North or as South Carolina and its ally Georgia against the rest of the country, the 3/5 compromise wasn't something Northerners imposed on the South.
It was also a tricky question because when it came to possible taxation on a per head basis, the slave owning states weren't keen on 100% representation either.
And where in heaven's name do you get the idea that slaveowners wanted to count their bondsmen as "fully human"? Tell me, what would letting their masters have greater representation in Congress have gotten the slaves? Would they have been able to demand fully human treatment in other things as well?