three-fifths compromise
Fractional population counting
The three-fifths compromise was an 1787 agreement at the U.S.
Constitutional Convention that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and taxation.
The compromise gave slaveholding states disproportionate political power while denying enslaved people any rights of citizenship.
It remained in effect until the Fourteenth Amendment (1868).
- Constitutional ConventionDocument-drafting assembly of founders
- AbolitionismMovement to end slavery
- Articles of ConfederationOriginal American governing charter
- Founding FathersRevolutionary-era American statesmen
- original sinInherited spiritual corruption
Human rights · Civil War · 13th Amendment · Federalist Papers · apportionment · slaveholder · Reconstruction Era · Jim Crow laws · representation · enumeration · population · slave states · free states · property · slaveholder
- constitutional lawConstitution, Bill of Rights, First Amendment, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment
- Antebellum Americaantebellum era, sectionalism, states' rights, Fugitive Slave Act, Kansas-Nebraska Act
- Early RepublicGeorge Washington, Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Constitutional Convention
- Founding FathersGeorge Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton
- Abolitionismabolitionists, abolitionist movement, anti-slavery, antislavery, abolitionism
three-fifths compromisewhole person
All of someone, unified
Fourteenth Amendment · birthright citizenship · equal protection · universal suffrage · civil rights
three-fifths compromiseThirteenth Amendment
Constitutional ban on bondage
Emancipation Proclamation · Fourteenth Amendment · abolition · abolitionism · Fifteenth Amendment
three-fifths compromiseMissouri Compromise
1820 slavery boundary legislation
Compromise of 1850 · principled stand · unconditional surrender
fifths, compromise, compromises, compromised, compromising, fifteen, promise, promises, promised