Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed Tuesday that the United States has never been a “racist” country, rejecting a suggestion that she might have trouble becoming the GOP president…
Three fifths compromise was an attempt to determine how to count the population in terms of representation. Free men of any race were counted as a whole person.
Leads to the question, was it racist because a slave should be counted as whole person and thus give slave owning populations more power in government despite the fact that the slave would not have their representatives advocate for them? Or should they not be counted as a person at all and thus be reduced to property with no representatives accounting for their population? Is being in the middle any worse than the extremes?
There is no morally right answer on the subject (because slavery itself makes any decision on the matter inherently immoral), however it needed to be addressed in terms of how representatives are distributed to the states.
Three fifths compromise was an attempt to determine how to count the population in terms of representation. Free men of any race were counted as a whole person.
Leads to the question, was it racist because a slave should be counted as whole person and thus give slave owning populations more power in government despite the fact that the slave would not have their representatives advocate for them? Or should they not be counted as a person at all and thus be reduced to property with no representatives accounting for their population? Is being in the middle any worse than the extremes?
There is no morally right answer on the subject (because slavery itself makes any decision on the matter inherently immoral), however it needed to be addressed in terms of how representatives are distributed to the states.
Do you really think they had white people in mind when they made the 3/5ths compromise?