Three-Fifths Compromise

The Three-Fifths Compromise is defended in the essays as a shared rule for apportioning representation and direct taxes among the states, and as a negotiated response to the conflict over how enslaved people should count. The defense turns on an acknowledged contradiction: enslaved people are treated as inhabitants for the purposes of representation and taxation, while their enslavement denies them the equal rights of free inhabitants. The rule is presented as a political accommodation, not as a resolution of that injustice.

The Apportionment Dispute

The argument begins with the proposed House of Representatives’ allocation among the states. The number of people in each state, the essay accepts, is the appropriate standard for determining each state’s share of representatives. Applying the same measure to direct taxes is a different matter: population is connected to personal rights, whereas it is only an imperfect measure of wealth and of a state’s contribution. Even so, the essay calls it the least objectionable practicable rule, and notes that it had recently received broad American approval.

That agreement on a population-based measure did not settle whether enslaved people belonged in the count. The objection is stated in its strongest form: if representation is measured by persons and taxation by property, enslaved people should be included in tax estimates as property but excluded from the population used to allot representatives. The essay answers by setting out the opposing case rather than treating the question as self-evident.

Enslaved People as Persons and Property

In the imagined argument of a Southern advocate, enslaved people cannot be described as property alone. The laws under which they live treat them in more than one way: they are compelled to labor for a master, can be sold from one master to another, and are subject to restraint and bodily punishment at the master’s will. Those conditions reduce them to the legal status of property. Yet the same laws protect their lives and bodies against violence by others, including their masters, and punish them for violence committed against others. The argument therefore presents them as members of society and moral persons as well as property.

From this mixed legal status, the advocate argues that the Constitution properly counts enslaved people as inhabitants. The case also turns the objection back on its critics: if the laws that deprive enslaved people of rights are invoked to deny them a place in representation, then restoring those rights would remove the stated basis for excluding them. The argument does not claim that their enslavement is just. Instead, it uses the legal condition imposed on them to defend counting them while also describing the very coercion that makes the arrangement possible.

A further appeal is to consistency between burdens and benefits. If enslaved people are counted when states’ tax contributions are calculated, the advocate argues, it would be partial to omit them when representation is allotted; the Southern states would be asked to accept their inclusion when burdens are imposed but refused the corresponding consideration when political advantages are distributed. Conversely, excluding them from both calculations would follow the states’ own practice of not counting them as voters or as an addition to their masters’ votes. The proposed rule is offered as a compromise between these competing claims: enslaved people count as inhabitants, but their status as enslaved lowers their count below that of free inhabitants. The essay expresses that reduction as two-fifths of a person, leaving three-fifths to be counted.

Representation, Property, and Political Bargaining

The defense also challenges the premise that representation concerns persons alone and has nothing to do with property. Government, the argument says, exists to protect property as well as persons; therefore, property may also be represented by those entrusted with governing. It points to New York, where one branch of the state government is described as especially intended to guard property and elected by the portion of society most interested in that purpose. The federal plan does not create a separate branch for property: personal and property rights are placed in the same hands. On this reasoning, property deserves some consideration in choosing those representatives.

The essay acknowledges that this reasoning may be strained in places, but concludes that it reconciles its author to the convention’s scale of representation. That qualified endorsement matters: the rule is defended as an accommodation within a difficult political settlement, not presented as a pristine or uncontroversial principle. The case is explicitly framed as reasoning a Southern advocate might make, and the author’s approval follows after the argument has been aired.

The compromise is also defended against the existing Confederation and other confederacies, including the United Netherlands. Under those arrangements, federal resolutions depended on subsequent, voluntary decisions by the member states, so equal votes in a common council did not necessarily translate into equal influence. Under the proposed Constitution, federal acts would take effect through a majority in the federal legislature without each state’s later intervention. Each representative’s vote would therefore have equal weight regardless of the size, wealth, or power of the state represented. The essay presents the apportionment rule as part of a system in which states’ relative populations affect their share of representation, but individual legislators’ votes carry equal force once cast.

A Common Measure and Its Incentives

Using one measure for representation and taxation is defended as a way to restrain manipulation of the census. If representation alone depended on population, states would have an incentive to exaggerate their numbers in order to gain seats. If taxation alone depended on that count, they would have the opposite incentive and might minimize it to reduce their obligations. Applying the common rule to both purposes gives states contrary interests that can check one another, the essay argues, and so encourages greater impartiality in reporting their populations.

This proposed balance of incentives belongs to a broader account of constitutional design in which institutions use competing interests to limit abuses. In its discussion of the separation of powers, the essay argues that constitutional means and personal motives must enable officeholders to resist encroachment by other departments. The people remain government’s primary control, but experience makes auxiliary precautions necessary. The apportionment rule applies a related logic to the states: rather than presume disinterested cooperation, it attempts to make the incentives attached to representation and taxation counterbalance each other.

Significance and Limits

The essay’s defense makes the compromise intelligible as a bargain over representation, taxation, and the political standing of states, but its own description lays bare the human cost beneath that bargain. Enslaved people are counted in a system that assigns political power to the states, even as the account acknowledges forced labor, sale, restraint, and bodily chastisement. Their population becomes consequential to representation and taxation without their own votes deciding who exercises the resulting political authority. The rule’s language of fractional counting converts that coercive status into an apportionment formula; the essay’s claim that enslaved people are both persons and property does not make the condition less oppressive.

The compromise thus operates on two levels in the argument. Institutionally, it is defended as a practicable settlement that connects population, seats, and tax obligations while balancing states’ incentives. Morally and politically, it records the unresolved conflict between the humanity the essay attributes to enslaved people and the legal order that treats them as property and denies them liberty. Its justification rests on that contradiction rather than overcoming it.