One of the most misunderstood aspects of the Constitution, the 3/5ths compromise was an essential feature in condemning the Peculiar Institution of Slavery to an ultimate death in America.

Today readers of the Constitution wonder precisely which kind of evil racist bastards the founders were. They do so because they perceive the 3/5ths counting of slaves as a legal conclusion that slaves, more particularly African slaves, were the equivalent of 3/5ths of a white person.

That makes for shocking headlines and dastardly allegations, but it misses that the 3/5ths compromise insured that the Southern States, where slavery ultimately confined itself, did not have an over-representation in the United States House of Representatives. We have to understand that, had the Constitution accounted for slaves as whole countable persons, then the census population of those States would have been greater. Compounding that problem, while the Southern States would be, on such an approach, entitled to more representatives than if slaves were not counted, the effect of counting slaves at all would have concentrated that oversized representative power in the hands of politicians selected by only the slave-owning and slave-tolerating portion of the State ... slaves could not vote.