> I legitimately do not understand these takes connecting everything to slavery. It's been more than a hundred years at this point. The trope is getting old.
It keeps coming up because in 2026 the compromises made to accommodate slave-owning states reverberate to this day.
The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 (at the Constitutional Convention) allowed slave-owning states to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. This gave the slave-owning states more representation in the House and more Electoral College votes in presidential elections.
This allowed the south to create a voting block that blocked legislation that would have given the formerly enslaved rights that other Americans had.
The Civil War ended in 1865; black Americans in the south were second class citizens and lived under an Apartheid state for the next 100 years until the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.
> We killed millions over the ability to own humans
"we" didn't kill millions; it's estimated that 750,000 soldiers were killed [1].
> The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 (at the Constitutional Convention) allowed slave-owning states to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. This gave the slave-owning states more representation in the House and more Electoral College votes in presidential elections.
This is only true if you omit a frame of reference. The slave states wanted slaves to count 1:1 when assigning representatives. The free states wanted them to not count at all. From the point of view of the slave states (which is a perfectly valid point to claim as there isn't an objectively correct baseline here), the 3/5 compromise gave them less representation. So yes, from one point of view the 3/5 compromise gave some states more voice than they should have had. From another point it gave them less. That's what makes it a compromise.
> From the point of view of the slave states (which is a perfectly valid point to claim as there isn't an objectively correct baseline here), the 3/5 compromise gave them less representation.
This is not accurate, and there was a baseline: one man equals one vote.
It was a compromise because the northern states didn't want to count slaves at all because they're not allowed to vote; they were just property.
Of course, the South wanted to count slaves (for census purposes) as a person, even though they couldn't vote.
By allowing slaves to be counted as 3/5 of a person, it enabled the South to have more representation in the House, since the number of representatives is based on the population of the state.
If they weren't allowed to count their slaves, they would have had fewer representatives in the House and wouldn't be able to control legislation, etc.
They wouldn't have done it if it resulted in less representation in Congress.
It keeps coming up because in 2026 the compromises made to accommodate slave-owning states reverberate to this day.
The Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787 (at the Constitutional Convention) allowed slave-owning states to count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person. This gave the slave-owning states more representation in the House and more Electoral College votes in presidential elections.
This allowed the south to create a voting block that blocked legislation that would have given the formerly enslaved rights that other Americans had.
The Civil War ended in 1865; black Americans in the south were second class citizens and lived under an Apartheid state for the next 100 years until the Voting Rights Act became law in 1965.
> We killed millions over the ability to own humans
"we" didn't kill millions; it's estimated that 750,000 soldiers were killed [1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Casualties