Free Republic

Don Lemon started his program by discussing comments made by Tennessee State Rep. Justin Lafferty, R-Knoxville, about the Three-Fifths Compromise. Then, he devoted a segment in the second hour of Wednesday’s “CNN Tonight” to the subject. Lemon told his audience, incorrectly, that the Constitution “explicitly counted [slaves] as three-fifths of a free person, or three-fifths of a man, so that the slave states would be able to accrue more political power without having to count a slave as a full person.” In fact, the Three-Fifths Compromise denied slave-owning states their request to count 100% of their slaves in the Census....