Power to the South: The Three-Fifths Compromise

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Power to the South: The Three-Fifths Compromise

As the drama of writing the Constitution for a new nation was going on during the summer of 1787 in Independence Hall in Philadelphia (then the home of the Pennsylvania Legislature), a different kind of drama was playing out in the streets of that city.

It was, according to the newspapers of the day and the letters sent home from delegates to the Convention, a brutally hot, muggy, mosquito-infested summer in Philadelphia. This was during a time when the mechanisms of weather were largely unknown, and superstition was thickly merged with Christianity.

Thus, on May 5, when a boy of about five years died of an apparent heatstroke, an elderly woman in town was accused of being the witch who’d cast a spell upon him. The delegates were just arriving in town for the opening of the Constitutional Convention on May 14 and no doubt noticed, as reported on May 11 in the Pennsylvania Packet newspaper, that the good citizens of the town grabbed the woman, known only as Mrs. Korbmacher (the German word for basket maker), on one of the main streets and tried to cut open her forehead to bleed her of evil spirits.1

Mrs. Korbmacher was having none of it, and she ran through the streets with an angry mob following her. A few people spoke up on her behalf but were shouted down or threatened by the crowd. At the end of the day, though, they let her live and she escaped.

She wasn’t so lucky, however, on July 10.

That day was a hot and muggy Tuesday, and on Friday of that week, in frustration, Edmund Randolph would submit the “Three-Fifths Compromise” to break the debate between slave states, free states, small states, and large states on the question of how many members of the House of Representatives each state should have.

It fundamentally shaped the future governance of America, and shaped the Electoral College as well for the next 240-plus years.

But on July 10, they were still slugging it out. James Madison’s notes described the scene, published in Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.2

The proposal put on the floor by Massachusetts’s Rufus King, a lawyer and member of the Continental Congress, was that the states should have representatives based on their potential white male voting population, which would have created a total of 65 House members.

King argued that although he didn’t want to disenfranchise the Southern slave states, they certainly didn’t have enough white citizens to justify a majority of the seats in the proposed Congress.

“The four Eastern States having 800,000 souls,” he said, according to Madison, “have ⅓ fewer representatives than the four Southern States, having not more than 700,000 souls, rating the blacks as 5 for 3.” This, he said, would upset the “Eastern states,” who would consider themselves the “subject [of] gross inequality.” While he wanted to preserve the “security of the Southern” states, there was “[n]o principle [that] would justify giving them a majority.”

The representative from Massachusetts, along with most of the other Eastern and Northern states, wanted to keep the union together with the Southern slave states, Madison noted, “but did not see how it could be done.”

This threw the Convention into chaos.

South Carolina’s Pinckney dramatically declared that if the Northern states had such a majority over the Southern states, then the slave states “will be nothing more than overseers for the Northern States.” And the Southern states had no intention of ever being under the thumb of the Northern states.

The day devolved from there.

Frustrated, they gave up the debate toward the end of the day and moved on to a series of largely typographic edits of what had already been agreed on in other areas of the Constitution.

The Racist Legacy of a Constitutional Compromise

While the delegates debated inside, outside Mrs. Korbmacher was being beaten to death by an angry and frightened mob. The heat had not relented. The mob was now sure that not only had she killed the little boy but she was trying to kill them too with the heat.

In 1787, it was widely believed among the white power structure of this country that some women were witches and that people with dark skin were lazy, stupid, incapable of feel- ing very much pain, and generally subhuman.

We look back on Mrs. Korbmacher’s sad story with a certain bemusement. Today, we no longer kill witches—the very idea of a woman being a “dangerous” witch is considered bizarre. But racial myths are still very much a part of the American political and social mindscape.

When a black man was elected president of the United States in 2008, almost a third of the white electorate believed that it was impossible for a black man to attain such an office by his own intellect and hard work.

Instead of winning through merit, talent, and political posi- tions, people like Donald Trump and David Duke asserted, Barack Obama must have been a stalking horse, a Manchu- rian candidate, raised up out of Kenya by malevolent Muslim forces and installed as a child in Hawaii to one day rule over and destroy white America.

And this wasn’t a worldview held exclusively by a small group of white bigots.

In 2017, white supremacists—“some very good people,” as Trump said—marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting, “You will not replace us Jews will not replace us.”

One avowed white supremacist murdered a counter-protester. Excluding the anomaly of 9/11, white supremacist terrorists killed more Americans in the previous three decades than did any other group, but police today are more likely to investigate black groups than white supremacist ones.3,4

The Ku Klux Klan didn’t come into its own until 1865. But its progenitors, mostly in the form of the slave patrols, were terrorizing black people with enthusiasm in 1787 and continue, under other names, to do so to this day.

On the slightly cooler morning of Friday, July 13, 1787, starting from the issue of taxation, the exhausted members of the Convention considered Randolph, James Wilson, and

Roger Sherman’s Three-Fifths Compromise, and it passed unanimously.5

They’d solved the problem, although they’d also set up the elections of John Quincy Adams, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, who all lost the popular vote but became president because they won the Electoral College.