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Three-Fifths Compromise

By 1776, some 286,000 Africans had been captured in their
homeland, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, and sold into
slavery in America. That was the year the American colonies re-
belled against Great Britain—a conflict born among colonists who
fought for self-determination, insisting that no foreign king should
hold power over their lives. The American Revolution ended in
1783 with Great Britain granting independence to the colonies. In
1789, delegates meeting in Philadelphia ratified the US Constitu-
tion, the laws that would govern the new nation. The preamble to
the Constitution reads: “We the People of the United States, in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure do-
mestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the
general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves
and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the
United States of America.”
These were noble and important words, but they didn’t apply
to everyone. If you were a black slave living in the South, the Con-
stitution did not apply to you. In fact, the Constitution didn’t even
treat the slaves as people. A question that vexed the delegates to
the Constitutional Convention was how to ensure that the states
were properly represented in the new US Congress. It was decid-
ed that the states would be split into congressional districts with
the states with larger populations receiving more congressional
districts and, therefore, more members in the House of Repre-
sentatives. But since slaves weren’t citizens, the states from the
South balked at this plan. By now, there were more than 340,000
slaves working on southern plantations. The southern delegates
demanded they receive representation in Congress reflecting the
number of slaves living on their plantations—although, of course,
slaves had no freedoms.
And so the delegates struck what was known as the “three-
fifths compromise.” For purposes of representation in Congress,
each slave would count as three-fifths of a person, thereby en-
hancing southern representation in Congress without granting

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