It was, in fact, a concession by the slaveholding south to anti-slavery opinion. One can always debate the merits of compromises, but counting slaves as full citizens for apportionment purposes, when they had no legal rights, would have been much worse.https://twitter.com/natalie_allison/status/1389603810142789632 …
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Replying to @baseballcrank
It is so weird that the modern take is that counting them as full citizens (thus giving the slaves states more power in Congress) is preferable to not counting them at all (which is what the non-slave-states wanted). Understandable, but irrational.
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Replying to @AaronK_MN @baseballcrank
If they were full, enfranchised citizens then the south being powerful wouldn’t have mattered because without black suppression the north and south would vote the same way on many issues.
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Replying to @MyNamesJakeToo @baseballcrank
This is no doubt true, but the 3/5ths compromise was made because slavery existed and the continental congress couldn’t change that. One could argue that we should have had a civil war back then, but there was no US without slavery. The south would not have joined the union.
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Accepting that slavery (unfortunately and tragically) was going to exist, the question was how to apportion power. Give slave states more power by counting them as 1? Or depower them by not counting them? Oddly enough, not counting them as people at all would have been better.
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But the belief that counting them as 3/5 (rather than 1) is a pro-slavery idea, rather than an anti-slavery idea is what is weird.
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It really was not. It would just have meant the slaveowners pocketed the gains in power without paying for them in liberty.
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