Sleeping Serpent
Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons – Article I, Section 2, Constitution of the United States
Late 19th century author John J. Chapman described America’s founding curse:
“…there was never a moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent.”
Mathematical Racism
Slavery was enshrined in our founding document, the Constitution. The Convention used a mathematical “sleight of hand,” only two sections after the transcendent language of the Preamble where they described forming “…a more perfect union”. Through process of elimination, slaves were left as “three fifths of all other persons”.
Why did those “all other persons” count as three fifths? In 1786, as the Constitution was being written in the hot summer of Philadelphia, the population of the new United States was about 2.8 million. Of those, 682,000 or about 24% were slaves, with the vast majority of those slaves in the South (Weber). As the debates raged on, the outlines of a democracy emerged. Population meant votes, and therefore power.
There was never a consideration of giving slaves a vote, but the South was unwilling to “give away” such a large population when it came to deciding how many Representatives they would have in the new Congress. The Southern representatives wanted the slaves counted as “whole” for population, but as none for taxes. The North wanted them either counted as whole for both, or neither. So in the same spirit of compromise that gave us a House by population and a Senate by state, slaves were counted as three fifths of a person.
Weighted Votes
That mathematical equation also gave the South enhanced power in the newly created Electoral College. States would receive votes for the President based on the number of Representatives in the House plus their two guaranteed Senators. The states of the South, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, were almost 40% slave. That 40% of non-voters empowered the other 60%, giving more weight to their “free person” votes.
The Civil War, and the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution removed the stain of slavery from the Constitution. But the arguments that supported the three-fifths personhood, that same idea that factors other than the vote of the people should determine how the country is governed, still echo in debate.
Land is Not Power
We hear them in discussions about the Electoral College. Last week in the impeachment debate on the floor of the House of Representatives, a Congressman displayed a map of the 2016 election results by County. It was the “great red map” of America, and the Congressman dramatically accused the House of trying to overturn its overwhelming result.
It looks impressive, the huge expanse of Red with only dots of blue scattered through. Mr. Trump overwhelming won the “land mass” of America. But even with the Founders, even with the slave owners, land didn’t mean power. Population meant power, even if “other persons” were counted but not empowered to vote. And so the sleight of hand of the Founders continues, as states of geographic size gain power through the Electoral College.
When the United States is viewed by voting, by the actual choices people make when they go to the polls, it no longer is the great “red” expanse.
This is what our nation looked like in 2016 looking at the essential factor of power established in the Constitution, the individual vote. When others argue that the Electoral College was created to offset the “power” of the individual vote, they echo the same arguments made in 1786 in support of slavery. They argue that some other factor should empower our nation, giving authority to a minority in order to prevent a majority from governing.
Democracy
It is anti-democratic. The argument is clothed in “republicanism” (the governing philosophy, not the Party) but in reality harkens back to the original sin of America’s founding. As the Founding Fathers compromised with slavery, so the present argument compromises the power of the vote to empower a diminishing racial group. We are compromising the core foundation of our nation, the value of an individual’s vote. Like the “sleeping serpent” under the table in Philadelphia, the obvious racism and bias will come back to bite our country.
