Glossary on the Republic
Three-Fifths Compromise
FoundingIt is the clause that counted an enslaved human being as three-fifths of a person, and it warped American politics for seventy years.
At the 1787 convention, after settling that the House would be based on population, a brutal question followed: who counts as population? The Southern states wanted their enslaved people counted, to gain more seats and more power, while denying those same people any rights at all.
The Northern states objected. The result was a grim bargain written into Article I: enslaved people would each be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of representation and taxation. Not citizens, not voters, just three-fifths of a number to inflate the slaveholders' political power.
The effect was enormous. The three-fifths count handed the South extra seats in the House and extra votes in the Electoral College for decades, strengthening the grip of slaveholding interests on the federal government far beyond their free population.
It was finally erased after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, repealed the three-fifths rule and required that representation be based on the whole number of persons in each state.
The 1787 clause counting each enslaved person as three-fifths for representation; repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment, 1868.
The Three-Fifths Compromise is the clearest proof that the Constitution was a document of its time, containing both soaring principle and moral compromise with slavery. Understanding it is understanding how the founding generation chose union over justice, and how long, and how bloody, the road to fixing that choice would be.
Quorum Reading Room. Sourced from public reference and historical record; see notes.