Pic Of The Moment: GOP Candidates: End Birthright Citizenship

[hfojvt]

26. you should know better than that

that 3/5's human stuff is just nonsense, and any educated person should know it.

Then again, I probably did not know it myself until a few years ago. The 3/5 meme seems to fly around the world before the truth gets its boots on.

The purpose of the 3/5 clause was not to de-humanize the slaves. Slavery already did that anyway. The purpose was to reduce the political power of the slave owners, and slave states. Congressional representation was (and still is) divided proportionally to population. If the 694,207 slaves in 1790 were counted as full citizens, that would give the slave states, and by extension the slave owners that much more representation in both Congress and the electoral college.

Really they should not have been counted AT ALL, but the slaves states would not join the union under those terms, so 3/5ths was a compromise. Instead of 694,207 in 1790, they counted as 416,000 or so. Which still gave the slave owners more extra representation than the entire state of Pennsylvania (for example).

I do not believe that women were ever considered subhuman either. Granted I am not quite old enough to have lived before 1920 (close, but not quite) but it seems likely to me that even in those dark ages that many, and probably most, men loved their wives and most children loved their mothers.