Originally posted by: Kevin Lewis
.......Furthermore, they appear to be OK with the part codifying slavery and stating that a black person is 3/5 of a white person.
Would you have preferred that slaves counted fully? That would have given the slave states a lot of power.
The 3/5 rule was an anti-slavery measure. The word "white" wasn't in the text. It meantions "free persons", "indians not taxed", and "other persons". Not all "free persons" were white. There were "free persons" that weren't white, especially in the North.
It had to do with the distribution of representatives within the federal government.
Federal representatives are apportioned according to population. The Slave States wanted their slave population to count fully. Anti-slave states didn't want the slaves to count at all.
If, the slaves were counted fully for this purpose then the slave states would have had a huge majority of representatives in the federal government.
The 3/5 rule was a compromise. Should the anti-slave states have dug in their heels and insisted the slaves didn't count at all? Perhaps.
But implying that the 3/5 rule was somehow designed or intended to disenfranchise black people is intellectually dishonest.