Not a Compromise, But Surely Colorblind
Near the end of Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, W.E.B. Du Bois laments how U.S. historians distort history to render it palatable for white folks. “We have too often a deliberate attempt,” Du Bois writes, “so to change the facts of history that the story will make a pleasant read for Americans.”
I think of this quotation when I hear folks chattering about the U.S. Constitution’s three-fifths “compromise.” For many, this “compromise” reveals Southern racism and Northern willingness to tolerate racism to found and preserve a fledgling country.
But this view of the three-fifths clause is false. It’s a mythical relic historians such as Richard Hildreth and G.T. Curtis constructed shortly before the U.S. Civil War. The truth is that the Constitution’s three-fifths clause never required a compromise.
I learned this truth from Max Farrand. Farrand writes:
That five slaves should count as three freeman had been incorporated in the revenue amendment of 1783 and had been accepted by eleven states before the Federal Convention ever met. When the Randolph resolutions were being considered in the Committee of the Whole, this same rule, avowedly taken from the proposed amendment to the Articles of Confederation, was adopted by a vote of nine to two. It was also embodied in the New Jersey plan. To regard this as a compromise is altogether a misinterpretation. It was aptly described by Rufus King in the Massachusetts state convention when he said that ‘this rule . . . was adopted, because it was the language of all America.’
The three-fifths clause reveals that racism permeated the founding and persevering of the U.S. The Northern delegates didn’t make a racist compromise for the country’s sake. They, like their Southern counterparts, acted in accordance with their and their constituents’ common commitments to white supremacy and racial capital.
***
Further analysis of the three-fifths clause reveals another, though more recent, myth: The claim that colorblind rhetoric is new. As George Lipitz writes: “Colorblindness purports to be a recent invention, an imputed product of the success of the civil rights movement, civil rights laws, and the political and legal gains they envisioned and enacted.” This historical claim is false. Again Lipitz:
Yet [colorblind theories are] merely a present-day manifestation of a long-standing political project emanating from Indigenous dispossession, colonial conquest, slavery, segregation, and immigrant exclusions. Its invocations of the egalitarian aims of the freedom movements of the mid-1960s hid an enduring allegiance to the evasions of accountability and practices of denial and disavowal at the heart of white supremacy.
The three-fifths clause contains colorblind evasions intended to sustain political and economic forms of white supremacy. The clause never mentions race or slavery; it speaks of “free Persons,” “those bound to Service for a Term of Years” (indentured servants), and “three fifths of all other Persons.” But as Lipitz argues:
Everyone knew that those “other persons” were African Americans held in bondage, who were not considered citizens or even humans in many other senses but whose enslavement added to the political power of the states in which they were held. Thus the first constitutional support for the slave system was articulated in a colorblind frame.
***
The three-fifths clause was not a compromise. It was a bipartisan effort to codify white supremacy with colorblind rhetoric. These truths are disturbing. So are the deliberate lies people tell to avoid them.
