the 3/5 compromise

     When the founders of the United States were writing the US Constitution, they couldn't agree on what to do about slavery. Some wanted it abolished. Too many others--those from the states where slavery was legal--could not agree. They also could not agree on what to do about slaves when the subject of proportional representation was discussed. They made two compromises. The first was that no anti-slavery law would be passed for twenty years. Twenty years later, the importation of slaves was made illegal.
     The second compromise was that each slave, for the purposes of apportioning congressional representatives, would be counted as 3/5 of a person, hence the name 3/5 Compromise. This meant that the more slaves a state had, the more representatives they would have in the Congress in Washington. The American South, from the very beginning, had political power out of proportion to the number of voting citizens. This didn't end until the slaves were emancipated during the Civil War.
      To learn just how out of proportion this political power was, we would also have to know how persons were counted in the North for the purposes of representation. For instance, were immigrants counted?--after all, they couldn't vote until they became citizens. Were propertyless working people counted?--these also could not vote. Neither could women. Indians were not counted, by a provision in the Constitution--they were not considered citizens until the 1920's. We would need a history of the US Census to find out how much leverage the 3/5 compromise gave to the American South.