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The Three-fifths Compromise was an agreement reached during the 1787 United States Constitutional Convention over the inclusion of slaves in a state's total population. This count would determine: the number of seats in the House of Representatives; the number of electoral votes each state would be allocated; and how much money the states would pay in taxes.
After a long deliberation, Madison came to a compromise that counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. The Three-Fifths Clause is perhaps the most misunderstood provision of the U.S. Constitution because the clause provides that the representation in Congress will be based on "the whole Number of free Persons" and "the three fifths of all ...
The Secret Journal of the Hartford Convention, published 1823. The Hartford Convention was a series of meetings from December 15, 1814, to January 5, 1815, in Hartford, Connecticut, United States, in which New England leaders of the Federalist Party met to discuss their grievances concerning the ongoing War of 1812 and the political problems arising from the federal government's increasing power.
This resolution apportioned seats in the House of Representatives based on a state's free population plus three-fifths of its slave population. Nine states voted in favor, with only New Jersey and Delaware against. [69] This compromise would give the South at least a dozen additional congressmen and electoral college votes. [70]
Ultimately, however, his most substantial contribution on this issue was his proposal of the Three-fifths Compromise, which would count three-fifths of each state's slave population toward that state's total population for the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives. As the Convention proceeded, he would come to disavow the ...
After the Three-Fifths Compromise resolved the issue of how to count slaves in the distribution of taxes and the apportionment of the members of the United States House of Representatives, two South Carolina delegates, Charles Pinckney and Pierce Butler, on August 28, 1787, proposed that fugitive slaves should be "delivered up like criminals".
The compromise was adopted by the Convention on July 16, 1787. On the contentious issue of whether slaves would be counted as part of the population in determining representation of the states in Congress or would instead be considered property and so not be counted, Ellsworth voted for the eventual Three-Fifths Compromise.
Furthermore, the Three-Fifths Compromise, more familiarly known at the time as the "federal ratio," allowed slaves to count as three-fifths of free men for the purposes of representation and taxation. [3]