When fifty-five delegates gathered in Philadelphia during the sweltering summer of 1787, they faced a challenge that would haunt American politics for the next eight decades. The question wasn’t whether slavery was morally right—many delegates privately acknowledged its evil—but whether a unified nation could exist with slavery as a part of it. That summer, the institution of slavery nearly killed the Constitution before it was born.
The Battle Lines
The convention revealed a stark divide. On one side stood delegates who spoke forcefully against slavery, though they represented a minority voice. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania delivered some of the most scathing condemnations, calling slavery a “nefarious institution” and “the curse of heaven on the states where it prevailed.” According to James Madison’s notes, Morris argued passionately that counting enslaved people for representation would mean that someone “who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections & damns them to the most cruel bondages, shall have more votes in a Government instituted for protection of the rights of mankind.”
Luther Martin of Maryland, himself a slaveholder, joined Morris in opposition. He declared the slave trade “inconsistent with the principles of the revolution and dishonorable to the American character.”. Even George Mason of Virginia, who owned over 200 enslaved people, denounced slavery at the convention, warning that “every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant” and that it would bring “the judgment of heaven on a country.”
The Southern Coalition
Facing these critics stood delegates from the Deep South—primarily South Carolina and Georgia—who made it abundantly clear that protecting slavery was non-negotiable. The South Carolina delegation was particularly unified and aggressive in defending the institution. All four of their delegates—John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, and Pierce Butler—owned slaves, and they spoke with one voice.
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney stated bluntly: “South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves.” John Rutledge framed it even more starkly: “The true question at present is, whether the Southern States shall or shall not be parties to the Union.” The message was unmistakable—attempt to restrict slavery, and there would be no Constitution and perhaps no United States.
The Southern states didn’t just defend slavery; they threatened to walk out repeatedly. When debates over the slave trade heated up on August 22, delegates from North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia stated they would “never be such fools as to give up” their right to import enslaved Africans. These weren’t idle threats—they were credible enough to force compromise.
The Three-Fifths Compromise
The central flashpoint came over representation in Congress. The new Constitution would base representation on population, but should enslaved people count? Southern states wanted every enslaved person counted fully, which would dramatically increase their congressional power. Northern states argued that enslaved people—who had no rights and couldn’t vote—shouldn’t count at all.
The three-fifths ratio had actually been debated before. Back in 1783, Congress had considered using it to calculate state tax obligations under the Articles of Confederation, though that proposal failed. James Wilson of Pennsylvania resurrected the idea at the Constitutional Convention, suggesting that representation be based on the free population plus three-fifths of “all other persons”—the euphemism they used to avoid writing the word “slave” in the Constitution.
The compromise passed eight states to two. New Jersey and Delaware are generally identified as the states voting against the compromise, New Hampshire is not listed as taking part in the vote. Rhode Island did not send a delegation to the convention and by the time of the vote New York no longer had a functioning delegation.
Though the South ultimately accepted the compromise, it wasn’t what they wanted. Southern delegates had pushed to count enslaved people equally with free persons—but otherwise ignored on all issues of human rights. The three-fifths ratio was a reduction from their demands—a limitation on slave state power, though it still gave them substantial advantage. With about 93% of the nation’s enslaved population concentrated in just five southern states, this compromise increased the South’s congressional delegation by 42%.
James Madison later recognized the compromise’s significance. He wrote after the convention: “It seems now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lies not between the large and small but between the northern and southern states. The institution of slavery and its consequences form the line of discrimination.”
Could the Constitution Have Happened Without It?
Here’s where I need to speculate, but I’m fairly confident in this assessment: no, the Constitution would not have been ratified without the three-fifths compromise and related concessions on slavery.
The evidence is overwhelming. South Carolina and Georgia delegates stated explicitly and repeatedly that they would not join any union that restricted slavery. Alexander Hamilton himself later acknowledged that “no union could possibly have been formed” without the three-fifths compromise. Even delegates who despised slavery, like Roger Sherman of Connecticut, argued it was “better to let the Southern States import slaves than to part with them.”
The convention negotiated three major slavery compromises, all linked. Beyond the three-fifths clause, they agreed Congress couldn’t ban the international slave trade until 1808, and they included the Fugitive Slave Clause requiring the return of escaped enslaved people even from free states. These deals were struck together on August 29, 1787, in what Madison’s notes reveal was a package negotiation between northern and southern delegates.
Without these compromises, the convention would likely have collapsed. The alternative wouldn’t have been a better Constitution—it would have been no Constitution at all, potentially leaving the thirteen states as separate nations or weak confederations. Whether that would have been preferable is a profound counterfactual question that historians still debate.
The Impact on Early American Politics
The three-fifths compromise didn’t just affect one document—it shaped American politics for decades. Its effects were immediate and substantial.
The most famous early example came in the presidential election of 1800. Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in what’s often called the “Revolution of 1800″—the first peaceful transfer of power between opposing political parties. But Jefferson’s victory owed directly to the three-fifths compromise. Virginia’s enslaved population gave the state extra electoral votes that proved decisive. Historian Garry Wills has speculated that without these additional slave-state votes, Jefferson would have lost. Pennsylvania had a free population 10% larger than Virginia’s, yet received 20% fewer electoral votes because Virginia’s numbers were inflated by the compromise.
The impact extended far beyond that single election. Research shows the three-fifths clause changed the outcome of over 55% of legislative votes in the Sixth Congress (1799-1801). (The additional southern representatives—about 18 more than their free population warranted—gave the South what became known as the “Slave Power” in Congress.
This power influenced major legislation throughout the antebellum period. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forcibly relocated Native Americans to open land for plantation agriculture, passed because of margins provided by these extra southern representatives. The Missouri Compromise, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and numerous other slavery-related measures bore the fingerprints of this constitutional imbalance.
The compromise also affected Supreme Court appointments and federal patronage. Southern-dominated Congresses ensured pro-slavery justices and policies that protected the institution. The sectional tensions it created led directly to later compromises—the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Compromise of 1850—each one a temporary bandage on a wound that wouldn’t heal.
By the 1850s, the artificial political power granted to slave states had become intolerable to many northerners. When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 without carrying a single southern state, southern political leaders recognized they had lost control of the federal government. Senator Louis Wigfall of Texas complained that non-slaveholding states now controlled Congress and the Electoral College. Ten southern states seceded in large part because they believed the three-fifths compromise no longer protected their interests.
The Bitter Legacy
The framers consciously avoided using the words “slave” or “slavery” in the Constitution, recognizing it would “sully the document.” But the euphemisms fooled no one. They had built slavery into the structure of American government, trading moral principles for political union.
The Civil War finally resolved what the Constitutional Convention had delayed. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, but not until 1868 did the Fourteenth Amendment finally strike the three-fifths clause from the Constitution, requiring that representation be based on counting the “whole number of persons” in each state.
Was it worth it? That’s ultimately a question of values. The Constitution created a stronger national government that eventually abolished slavery, but it took 78 years and a war that killed over 600,000 Americans. As Thurgood Marshall noted on the Constitution’s bicentennial, the framers “consented to a document which laid a foundation for the tragic events which were to follow.”
The convention delegates knew what they were doing. They chose union over justice, pragmatism over principle. Whether that choice was necessary, wise, or moral remains one of the most contested questions in American history.
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Sources
- https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/slavery-and-constitution
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Martin
- https://schistorynewsletter.substack.com/p/7-october-2024
- https://www.americanacorner.com/blog/constitutional-convention-slavery
- https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-august22.htm
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-fifths_Compromise
- https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/electoral-colleges-racist-origins
- https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/historical-context-constitution-and-slavery
- https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/constitutionalconvention-august29.htm
- https://www.lwv.org/blog/three-fifths-compromise-and-electoral-college
- https://www.aaihs.org/a-compact-for-the-good-of-america-slavery-and-the-three-fifths-compromise-part-ii/
The Contradictory Life of Thomas Jefferson
By John Turley
On March 18, 2023
In Commentary, History
Part I, Liberty and Slavery
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These stirring words that Thomas Jefferson used in the Declaration of Independence put forth a clear statement of his political philosophy. Unfortunately, the man behind the words is not nearly so self-evident. To borrow a phrase from Winston Churchill, he is a riddle wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an enigma. Biographer Joseph Ellis referred to him as The American Sphinx.
He was a man of the enlightenment, but he was also a man clearly bound to the brutal slave economy. He dreamed of a bucolic America peopled by hardworking yeoman farmers while he lived the life of a wealthy British aristocrat. He abhorred the thought of banks and bankers but spent his entire life mired in debt. He wrote and spoke often of the need to avoid factionalism in politics but was a skillful practitioner of political intrigue. He constantly argued against expansion of governmental power but as President, without having the authority, he undertook to expand the United States to more than double its size.
So, how do we reconcile the words with the man? Perhaps we don’t. Perhaps the best we can do is try to understand the world in which he lived and the circumstances that led him to take such contradictory positions in his political and personal life. Tens of thousands of pages have been written trying to understand and explain Thomas Jefferson. Now, I’m only going to look briefly at his relationship to slavery. In a later post I’ll be looking at Thomas Jefferson as the master of political manipulation.
Of the many contradictions in Thomas Jefferson’s life, his relationship to slavery is the most difficult to reconcile. One of his first cases after becoming a lawyer was to represent a slave seeking his freedom on the grounds that his grandmother was a mulatto which would require him to be in bondage only until age 31. In an argument to the Virginia court Jefferson said, “Everyone comes into this world with the right to his own person, this is what is called personal liberty and is given them by the author of nature, under the law we are all born free.”
Both the judge and the jury were outraged that Jefferson would propose freeing a slave. The judge refused to hear any further such talk and ruled against Jefferson’s client. According to historian Winston Groom the fact that Jefferson had such a position at that time (1770) is considered significant and was a milestone in the evolution of his thought.
About that same time Jefferson was elected to the House of Burgesses and he introduced an act that would allow masters to govern emancipation of their slaves rather than having to seek the permission of the courts and the royal officers. This was met with strong opposition and did not pass. It is significant that Jefferson did not pursue either the court case or the legislation.
As a member of the Continental Congress, Jefferson prepared an amendment to the Ordinance of 1784 (a precursor to the Northwest Ordinance) stipulating the freedom of all children born to slaves after a certain date but requiring that they be deported to either the Caribbean or Africa. This amendment failed by a single vote in Congress. Reflecting on the decision Jefferson wrote: “Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man and heaven was silent in that awful moment”. But Jefferson was to remain silent as well!
To Jefferson it was unimaginable that free whites and free blacks could live together peaceably. Even years later when writing about it he said that it was “inconceivable [then] that the public mind would bear this proposition, nor will it bear at this day”. He also wrote “Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it or worse will follow, nothing is more surely written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” According to Jefferson’s biographer Jon Meacham, he was never able to move public opinion on slavery and his powers failed him and they failed America.
As president, Jefferson signed a law making it a crime to import slaves. But at the same time, he believed that if slaves were set free, they must be deported to Africa or the Caribbean. Most of his contemporaries agreed; they felt that American slavery was equivalent to “holding the ear of a tiger”, but they saw no way to let go.
So again, we return to the question of how to reconcile Jefferson the philosopher with Jefferson the enslaver. Jefferson was a man who enjoyed luxury and the finer things in life. Today he is viewed as a wealthy planter. However, he was what we would now consider cash poor. All his wealth was tied up in property and his slaves were a large portion of that property. His land was heavily mortgaged, and his slaves were his collateral. Jefferson’s wife was the daughter of a wealthy man and when her father died Jefferson inherited his 135 slaves and his land, which was also heavily mortgaged. He also inherited his father-in-law’s other considerable debts. He worried constantly about his financial status, yet he could not control his lavish spending. Freeing his slaves would have lost him the collateral against which his many loans were guaranteed.
Jefferson recognized the evil of slavery but also benefited greatly from it. He was unable to give up his comfortable life even while bemoaning the institution which made it possible. His relationship with Sally Hemmings has been a subject of much debate and is beyond what I can address here but if you are familiar with her story, you know that this a singular example of Jefferson’s inability to subordinate his desires to his principles.
During his lifetime he freed only two of his slaves and in his will, he freed only an additional three. This compares to some other founders who freed all their slaves in their wills. Perhaps he recognized that freeing his slaves would have resulted in an immediate foreclosure on his beloved Monticello.
It is long been axiomatic among historians that people should be judged by the time in which they lived. Jefferson was a man of his times, an exceptional man without doubt. However, his was a time that was consumed by one of the great evils of history. And that evil will always reflect on his memory. Each of us will have to make our own decision about Thomas Jefferson.
Further reading:
Thomas Jefferson the Art of Power, John Meacham
Jefferson and Hamilton the Rivalry That Forged a Nation, John Ferling
The Patriots, Winston Groom
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, Fawn Brody