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16 SLAVERY AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION
competing confederacies, then the European powers would bring
with them to America the balance-of-power and great-power politics
competition the Americans wanted to avoid. In the face of the possibility
that this union wouldn’t include all of the 13 states, it’s perhaps
understandable why the Convention did not wait to see
whether South Carolina and Georgia were bluffing or not, and why
they were willing, then, to accept a 20-year extension of the slave
trade for those states—and only those states—that wanted to keep it.
Finally, I’d like to turn to the third big clause, the so-called threefifths
clause that deals with taxation and representation. This is
probably the clause in the Constitution that has had more nonsense
said about it than any other. The usual point is captured in the title
of a book, Three-Fifths of a Man, 7 with the point being that counting
the slaves as three-fifths was a statement of Americans’ estimate of
the degree of humanity of black people. There are at least two facts
that speak against that interpretation. First, free blacks were
counted as full persons for purposes of representation, and as the
statistics I cited earlier indicate, the number of free blacks was not
negligible and was indeed, it seemed, growing. So this was not a
racial matter per se. The second fact of significance is that the slave
states and the slave owners at the Convention were the ones pressing
to count the slaves as full persons. And the Northerners, who
were in the process of getting rid of slavery, were the ones who
wanted to count the slaves for nothing, for zero. This fact I think is
most inconvenient for the normally circulated account of the meaning
of the Three-Fifths Clause.
The three-fifths formula, in fact, arose under the Articles of Confederation,
and it was part of an attempt to come up with a formula
that would allow Congress to calculate how much each state owed
the general budget to pay into the Treasury of the United States at
that time to offset the cost of the war. The original plan in the Articles
of Confederation was to assess the total wealth of each state and
then charge them in proportion to that. I don’t know exactly how
one would go about doing that—this would be a daunting task at
any time—but imagine trying to do it during a war. After a while,
they got the idea that this was not going to work, so they came up