Beckwith's Three-Fifths Compromise view glosses over slavery expansion

Yahoo

29-04-2025

'Our Fathers in forming the Federal Constitution entered into a guilty compromise on the subject of Slavery, and heavily is that sin now visited upon their children.' The bracing opening line of William Jay's 1839 book continues to sting hard.
Jay's revered father, John Jay, was the inaugural U.S. chief justice, co-author of The Federalist Papers and canny advocate for the ratification of the Constitution. It was brave of William Jay, himself a socially conservative law-and-order judge, to so forthrightly assess the founders' flaws and to name the moral and political wreckage that the Three-Fifths Compromise facilitated.
Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, by contrast, recently described the three-fifths clause, which counted three out of every five enslaved people toward each state's share of congressional representation, as a 'great move.' He claimed the compromise paved the way for slavery's end, embracing the fantasy of a morally and politically blameless founding. That he did so in order to justify dismantling diversity, equity and inclusion efforts to reckon with slavery's ongoing racist legacies dishonors subsequent generations of Americans who fought together in an interracial alliance to dislodge a truly evil institution woven into our nation's original fabric.
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Abolitionists like William Jay, denounced as 'zealots' and even 'anti-American' in their own time, understood clearly what the lieutenant governor does not. The infamous compromise gave southern states political leverage through additional seats in Congress and additional weight in the Electoral College to relentlessly shape national policy domestic and international policy to the advantage of slaveholders.
Slavery expanded westward through a massive and brutal internal slave trade, while U.S. diplomats demanded the return of enslaved people fortunate enough to escape the country and shed their bondage. The federal government undermined the First Amendment by allowing southern postmasters to interdict antislavery literature. Through so-called gag rules, Congress itself refused to take up antislavery petitions.
The three-fifths clause, William Jay once wrote, ensured the domination of 'cotton, sugar and human flesh' in US policy.
Many of the founders hoped that slavery would not last. Some even took personal and political actions that attempted to curtail slavery, including in the future state of Indiana. And, to be sure, southern delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention would have delivered even more unshakeable advantages to their region if every enslaved person had counted toward their state's representation in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. The framers of the Constitution might have done worse.
The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued that the Constitution could even be used to thwart slavery if interpreted in certain ways. For such antislavery readings to prevail required sustained moral courage in the face of fierce headwinds, constitutional and racist.
To embrace the lieutenant governor's sunny view of the three-fifths clause is to become captive to a version of the past that sweeps away the responsibility to identify our country's guiltiest compromises — and to act in each subsequent generation to overcome the legacy of those compromises.
David N. Gellman is a history professor at DePauw University and author of "Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York," which won the Herbert H. Lehman Prize.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Beckwith's Three-Fifths Compromise remarks show ignorance | Opinion