I learned something rather valuable and interesting today about our Constitution. Something that rather dramatically clarified what I thought of the idea that African American slaves were once only counted by the census as three-fifths of a person, compared to the whole "five-fifths" of all other persons. My comprehension of that line was that slaves were simply not valued as highly, nor given consideration as highly as that of a white person, and consequently didn't even have the right to vote amongst other things.
Well, that was actually true, but according to historians the reasoning behind the 3/5ths thing had far greater political reasons behind it than I knew, and they make an awful lot of sense. It certainly had far greater meaning behind it than Glenn Beck knew either, but then are any of us really surprised by that?
What I learned today is coming up after the jump:
So Glenn Beck, historic fanfic writer extraordinare, tried to make a case for why the 3/5ths clause in the constitution was (in his reality) very anti-slavery. This was inspired apparently by the recent reading of the Constitution in the US House of Representatives, and their exclusion of this line in their reading:
African-Americans: three-fifths in the South, three-fifths of a human being. That's an outrage, unless you know why they put that in there. They put that in there because if slaves in the South were counted as full human beings, they could never abolish slavery. They would never be able to do it. It was a time bomb.
Progressives should love that. It was a way to take a step to abolish slavery. It is a tremendous story about our Founders, about the genius of the Constitution -- but that might offend some people, so they skipped it. They skipped it. That's offensive to me.
Media Matters, however, wasn't buying it and decided to get some feedback from people who ARE Constitutional historians that actually know what the hell they're talking about:
University of Pennsylvania history professor Rick Beeman wrote:
My goodness -- Glenn Beck got it completely wrong. They put [the three-fifths clause] there because delegates from the Southern states would never have agreed to the Constitution unless some weight was given to their slave populations in the apportionment of representation. They wanted slaves counted 100%, but when they saw that they could not get that, they settled for 3/5. The practical effect of that, far from making easier to abolish slavery, made it more difficult. It gave added weight to southern political power in Congress, it inflated Southern power in the apportioning of electoral votes, which led to a succession of Southern presidents. Ironically, the best thing that could have been done with respect to making it easier to abolish slavery would have been to have given slaves NO weight in the apportioning of representation.
Beck's comments are so depressingly typical of those who cite the Constitution to defend their views without having any understanding of the Constitution's history [emphasis added].
In a subsequent phone interview, Beeman also said of Beck's comment:
That was where Beck was fundamentally wrong. Going as far as giving slaves a status of three-fifths of a person gave the South far more power because slaves were not treated as full citizens. Slaves did not have any rights at all, including voting rights.
So, basically being able to count those slaves as "people", even if they weren't accorded the full rights as citizens, allowed them to basically "pad" their constituency, and therefore significantly raise their representation numbers in Congress. Even if some of those "constituents" never would get to vote for what were ostensibly their own members of Congress at all.
Huh. Well, that makes a good deal of sense, and I'll get into later how we're actually still doing that even today, just with a different population that has no voting rights.
Yale University professor Akhil Reed Amar, who teaches constitutional law, wrote in his book, America's Constitution: A Biography:
In any event, the Constitution as drafted and ratified committed the new nation to perpetually credit slavery in the apportionment process. Confronting this harsh constitutional calculus, some antebellum antislavery leaders sought to construe three-fifths as a moral victory of sorts. On this view, anything less than five-fifths was an acknowledgment that slavery was constitutionally disfavored. The document's pointed refusal to use the S-word in the apportionment formula and elsewhere further evidenced the document's implicit antislavery stance, in the eyes of these apologists.
And then there's how Amar addresses Glenn Beck's previous argument:
Some theorists went so far as to claim that the Article I formula actually encouraged abolition: a state that freed its slaves could increase its share of the House by counting its blacks at five-fifths, thus avoiding the two-fifths slavery penalty.
This clever argument blinked the fact that states with large slave populations were hardly inclined to free slaves while encouraging freedmen to remain within the state as valued citizens. Dreams and schemes of colonization accompanied most serious proposals for widespread abolition. If emigration followed emancipation, a state would not rise from three to five-fifths, but rather would sink to zero-fifths as freedmen moved out. Contrary to apologists' rosy mathematics, a slave state would thus likely wield less congressional clout after emancipation. [Page 90, America's Constitution (2005), accessed 01/07/2011]
So, basically the last thing that any slave becoming free would probably want to do would be to stick around and continue living in a state where they had been enslaved. Meaning, those states would see a drop in their Congressional representation were the slaves to be freed.
Amar continues:
Once we envision the possibility of black bodies crossing borders, the extreme viciousness of the three-fifths clause comes violently into view. The more slaves the Deep South could import from the African continent -- innocents born in freedom and kidnapped across an ocean to be sold on auction blocks -- the more seats it would earn in the American Congress.[...]
To make matters worse, despite the new Congress's general Article I, section 8 power over international commerce, section 9 barred Congress from ending the international slave trade before 1808. By that time, the Deep South hoped to have enough extra muscle in Congress, based on white migration and slave importation, to thwart any possible antislavery constitutional amendments and perhaps even to weaken any proposed ban on further slave importation. Unlike every other clause in the entire Constitution, the 1808 date itself was exempt from constitutional amendment under Article V. [Pages 90-91, America's Constitution (2005), accessed 01/07/2011]
Isn't that the most devious thing you've ever heard of? Actually using the slave population itself to build that state's power in Congress, thus providing more weight to the pro-slavery states, and assuring that slavery could not end until 1808.
Know what? It still happens today, but to a different population of people who can't vote for the members of Congress to the district in which they reside. Prison inmates.
Now rather than the 3/5ths rule applying to slaves, prison inmates are actually counted each as one whole person, but are counted to be "residing" in the actual location of their incarceration, and not the community where they lived before. So where are prisons generally located? In rural, sparsely populated areas, most of which are generally conservative and not exactly the most ethnically diverse of regions.
According to Peter Wagner, Executive Director of the Prison Policy Initiative, it's not just dumb luck that most of those districts where prisons are located end up dramatically increasing the political representations, and consequently the political power of these districts:
Unfortunately, the process of drawing fair and equal legislative districts fails when the underlying data is flawed. Drawing district lines around prisons results in giving some people disproportionate influence over the legislature. The impact is the strongest in county board districts, where a single prison can be as much as 90% of a district, giving the people who live immediately adjacent to the prison ten times as much political influence as others.
So, you could live in a tiny town of several hundred people, but if you share a legislative district with a prison of thousands of inmates, it exponentially increases the "representation" of that district....even though only the tiny portion of residents (i.e. the ones that aren't prison inmates) would have the right to vote for who represents that district.
The website, PrisonersOfTheCensus.org, has a great page that outlines on a state-by-state basis, some particulars regarding the apportionment of congressional districts as they pertain to correctional facilities in that state. Very interesting reading, to be sure.
There are efforts being made on the part of various state legislatures to fix this gerrymandering problem, primarily by passing laws that require a prison inmate to be counted as part of the district where they previously resided before incarceration, rather than of the prison location.
But if you take a look at many of the conservative rural districts, it's no real surprise if you see that those districts also have a significant prisoner population to pad their numbers, having the effect of giving that district far more power than they otherwise would have.
Undocumented immigrants are also (much to the chagrin of Republicans) counted in the census, and while they tend to more frequently reside in more urban areas, the impact is questionable since most undocumented immigrants don't respond to the Census for fear of being arrested or deported. That's another very complicated issue, but one also to keep in mind when looking at the overal problem how the census numbers don't generally provide an accurate representation in a particular district.
Ultimately, the practice of counting these non-voting populations as part of Congressional apportionment conflicts directly with the constitutional principle of "one person, one vote". But there may also be reasons why counting these people for non-voting reasons might also be important to do, and the resolution to this problem may not quite so obvious as simply counting someone's previous domicile as their "residence" while they are incarcerated.
ETA: You know what galls me about this? I actually have Glenn Beck's crazed reality smithing to thank for the fact that I learned something valuable about this topic. Not from GB, mind you....but it put me on the trail of the rest of the information that actually is fact-based. So yeah....there's that.