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As the U.S. revolutionaries issued their final GTFO my country to the Brits, the Founding Fathers were all let’s constitution this bitch. The Northern founders proclaimed “slavery bad” and their Southern counterparts said “slavery good.” A compromise amongst these plaster-pigmented penisfolk involved agreeing that enslaved Black people counted as only three-fifths of a person.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 18, 1783--
The North said hey we founded this shit on liberty so maybe that should also apply to these people we’ve been treating like things. The South said “But the economy! Also, we’re really fucking racist.” The North said “well we’re racist too so let’s see if we can work this shit out.”
In the beginning, God created the 13 states. I’m sure some people believe that. A precursor “Articles of Confederation” was ratified in 1781, and it had much emphasis on the sovereignty of the state and not having the feds telling them what to do, which is why some states say smoke all the weed you want, and others say marry all the cousins you want.
On April 18, 1783, an amendment was proposed to this early constitution to determine the tax obligations of each state. The amendment said taxes would be paid in proportion to “age, sex, and quality.” It also said don’t worry about those Indians they don’t count. Note the words “proportion” and “quality.” They started throwing numbers around to describe enslaved people. Half a person? Three-quarters? It was Founding Father James Madison who came up with three-fifths. Anyway, the amendment didn’t pass.
Four years of fuckery later and Madison’s magic fraction came up again. The North was like we still wanna tax you based on the number of your slaves, and the South said if you tax us then we get more government representatives cuz taxation means representation, motherfuckers. Someone said what about that three-fifths thing? And there was some debate but eventually the various states agreed that okay, yeah, these slaves are three-fifths a person in terms of taxes, and they also count as that number for determining our number of seats in the House of Representatives.
In terms of lasting consequences, the three-fifths compromise became a legal representation of the “less than human” ideology held by many in the United States regarding the Black population. It was also a justification for many more discriminatory laws made to further dehumanize Black people. Additionally, it gave slave states greater representation in federal government without having to enact any laws for the betterment of the slave population that allowed such states to have that additional representation in the first place. The enslaved couldn’t vote and weren’t seen as constituents, but rather as property. Just more pasty people having their cake and eating it too kinda shit.
The three-fifths compromise was repealed in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended, with the ratification of the 14th Amendment which addressed citizenship rights and equal protection under the law.
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