Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.

Welcome back to Constitutional Conventions, where I give you Constitutional interpretations…for cool people.

Today we’ll talk about the above sentence, which contains within it what is popularly known as the three fifths clause.  The clause was a compromise between southern states with slave-dependent economies and northern states without them.  It was decided that for the purposes of determining representation, slaves would count as 3/5 of a person.  Southern planters had more representation because they owned more people.  Between this and the allowance of the slave trade until 1808, our Constitution recognized slavery as an institution.  Just think about that for a second.  Think of all the rights our Constitution grants us, all the things about it we take as sacred writ, and now consider that this same document implicitly acknowledges owning people as a right.  How does that make you feel?

Of course there is no actual use of the words “slavery” or “slave” in the Constitution.  In a way that is even worse.  When our founders decided that they needed to make the peculiar institution official, they couldn’t even find the gonads to say it outright.  In the 3/5 clause, they get away with “other persons.”  The clause limiting the slave trade is a little more complicated.  It refers to “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit.”  Really?  That’s a little far to go to avoid saying a word.

I know what you’re thinking.  “Alex, this is interesting, but what I really want to know is what does W.E.B. DuBois think of all this?”  Well maybe not, but I do think it is an interesting and important quote:

With the faith of the nation broken at the very outset, the system of slavery untouched, and twenty years’ respite given to the slave-trade to feed and foster it, there began, with 1787, that system of bargaining, truckling, and compromising with a moral, political, and economic monstrosity, which makes the history of our dealing with slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century so discreditable to a great people.

So…what the hell am I talking about?  Why does it matter that the Constitution had these inequities, we fixed them with the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments.  Should the Constitution never have been written?  Should the delegates against slavery have pushed until the Southern delegates left the convention?  That isn’t what I’m saying.  I ‘m saying that it is important to keep in mind that the men who wrote the Constitution were, as the euphamism goes, “men of their time.”  This means that while they did good things, by our standards they were all impossibly bigoted and overall pretty unpleasant, as well as completely unfamiliar with indoor plumbing.  Nothing should remain unquestioned simply because they wrote it down in their power-sharing agreement.  We must always be on the lookout for ways to make our government better, to correct any inequalities the Constitution left uncorrected.  These were very smart men, the ones who put together our founding document.  They were woefully unqualified, however, to govern a country 200 years in the future.