In an otherwise generally sound call for separation of church and state, 2%Co had this to say about democracy in Dixie (1789-1865):
. . . These slaves didn’t always like their lot in life, but according to your logic, Mrs Gong, they should have just shut up and slaved away. Hey, rule by the majority, right? They even had a nifty way of making sure that the white folks stayed in the majority — they made black folk equal to only 3/5 of a person. What a great deal! . . .
I put my quixotic toe in:
I’m surprised to see this [common] misconception propagated by such enlightened people. . . . If the slavers had their way at the Convention of 1787, slaves would have been counted fully, not 3/5. It was the Northerners who wanted slaves counted for zero. . . .
After going around a couple of times, 2%Co apparently agree with this point (though to avoid conceding that I said something accurate they present it as their own), but insist that it supports their original statement — and threaten to delete any further posts from me. It appears that they have done so, so I’ll repeat my conclusion here (as best I can recall it):
Now I admit I’m not clever enough to see how these statements can both be accurate, viz that it was in the interest of the same faction to reduce the representation of slaves in the census and to increase it; or why, given that slaves had no vote, any nifty trick was needed to ensure they remained a minority. If you can resolve this seeming contradiction, I’ll be delighted at learning something new; if you can say “oops” and move on, I’ll be impressed with your integrity. Since you refuse to do either, I guess I’m left with the hope that another reader – if you have any – will help me out.
No, Anton, we didn’t delete your comment, it got caught by our spam filter. And we never threatened to delete it, we told you that if you kept asking the same question over and over again, we’d move you to our post that is set up for off-topic and stupid comments. That is what we will do with your comment, when we go through our spam list. Once again, you seem unwilling or unable to comprehend what we’ve said to you. That’s basically the story of every comment you’ve left on our site.
By the way, if the above is your take on our conversation, then you need to seek help.
Thanks for the clarification. Since I couldn’t find a link to “the Urinal” I guessed that was your word for the bit-bucket – not that there’s a world of practical difference.
Interested readers, if any, can click the link and decide for themselves whether my summary is unfair.
Oops, I see I did get one thing wrong; 2%Co are justified in saying my reading comprehension is not all it could be. Reading quickly (in a font which is not the most readable) I saw that they said something about the history of the 3/5 compromise – and assumed they got it right. This charitable misunderstanding of mine goes to the root of the dispute.
2%Co said:
If you read Madison’s record of the Convention (my copy is in a box somewhere), I think you’ll find that the Southerners wanted slaves counted fully while Northerners wanted slaves counted not at all, the 3/5 rule being a compromise between these competing interests. According to Wikipedia the 3/5 ratio was proposed by a Pennsylvania delegate.
2%Co
sayimply that the 3/5 rule was all the Southerners’ idea, because the slaves, if given full weight in the census, would thereby acquire “actual power or influence”. How that could happen when slaves did not vote is not obvious to my puny mind.(I don’t think any State has ever had a Black majority, by any count; on another hand, I’ll bet there were some counties where slaves even at a 3/5 discount were a majority.)
There’s an interesting story behind the whole representation thing, by the way. Under the Articles of Confederation, the federal government had no taxing power of its own, but billed the member States in proportion to the value of property therein. Such an assessment is inevitably contentious, open to charges of dishonest accounting, so the Convention of 1787 sought an easier formula. Since free people tend to migrate from poorer places to richer ones, wealth per capita should tend to converge, so a census of the free population was proposed as a proxy for the property measure.
Meanwhile it had been proposed that Representatives be allocated according to the amounts contributed to the federal revenue. No taxation without proportional representation!
And thus the notion of representation in proportion to population came in the back door, as it were.
All differences aside, why would you read our statements as meaning that the southerners were the ones who cam up with the 3/5 number? In our initial post, we were silent about who came up with the 3/5 number — we merely said that the way the southern states maintained their power (in the national government, which we didn’t explicitly state in this post since this was one small point in a larger post about something else entirely) was by counting slaves as 3/5 of a person.
Here’s our initial comment on this, from our post on Newdow’s pledge case. We were explaining to a commenter (Mrs Gong) why being in the majority doesn’t always make you right:
We didn’t say that the south went into the discussion with 3/5 in their heads, but we did say that 3/5 was the number that was eventually used. The very name of the Three-Fifths Compromise suggests that the 3/5 number was just that — a compromise. We’re willing to bet that the South would have liked to count the slaves as high as possible (unless bigotry outweighed their desire for personal power), and that the North would have liked to count the slaves as non-people (unless anti-bigotry outweighed their desire for personal power, which is even less likely). We also didn’t say anything about slaves getting 3/5 of a vote, either, though you seem to have gotten that idea from our quote above as well.
Our other comment, which you quoted above, says:
Basically, we never said that the 3/5 rule was “all the Southerners’ idea” at any point in any post or comment. Seriously. Go back and re-read them, and you’ll see that. Granted our initial mention of the topic was brief and not very detailed, but that was because, as we said, this was one reply to one part of one commenter’s post in a larger article about the Newdow pledge case.
Our basic point was that the white majority in the south were oppressing the black slaves. So, being in the majority doesn’t make someone right. We extended that idea by saying that the southerners used their local influence to work a deal to increase their power on a national level by leveraging their slaves without given the slaves anything in return. That’s all we were saying. We were silent on any other details because it wasn’t an essay on the Three-Fifths Compromise.
As an aside, we have a checkbox marked “Large Type Edition” that renders our site in larger font. We know that we use small font, and we like how the site looks that way, but we also give readers an option to use larger print.
What does the pronoun they mean, if not the powerful white landowners ? I see no other candidates for an antecedent.
Why else mention the 3/5 rule in a passage about the “democratic” rule of masters over slaves? It would be simpler and more accurate to say “They had a nifty way . . . they prevented the black folk from voting.”
It’s disappointing to see even an opponent make a bad argument. Of course on the broader point – that democracy ought not to be a blank check against the minority – we’re on the same side.
The “Large Type” checkbox does nothing that I can’t do for myself with ctrl-plus; less, in fact, since I can hit that key again for further enlargement. But at whatever size, Trebuchet Bold remains over-heavy, with (to my eye) slightly too little whitespace between letters. Conventional typesetting confines Bold to special functions rather than using it for extended text, for a reason. I’m happy for you that you like the look; my site would look almost as good to you if you set Trebuchet Bold as your browser’s default font.
I might decide to delete this thread. Any objection?
I think I will try to recommend this post to my friends and family, cuz it’s really helpful.