Description:

Slavery

Massachusetts Advocates Abolishing 3/5 Compromise

 

2pp printed broadside proposing a constitutional amendment that would abolish the 3/5 Compromise. Docketed by an unknown hand verso. In very good condition. With expected folds, overall toning, some foxing, and chipped edges.  Each page measures 8.125" x 12.375."

 

Issued from Boston on June 22, 1804 by Massachusetts Governor Caleb Strong (1745-1819) and addressed to New York Governor George Clinton (1739-1812).

 

This fascinating document reveals how the U.S. Constitution was subject to change well into the Early Republic. In 1787, Constitutional Convention delegates James Wilson and Roger Sherman proposed the 3/5 Compromise, so-called because it counted slaves as 3/5 of a white person. This new law affected a state's overall population count, which in turn informed its projected gross income and tax rate. Thus the 3/5 Compromise greatly impacted both the voting and tax systems.

 

Yet thirty years later, Massachusetts argued that the 3/5 Compromise unfairly benefited Southern slave-holding states by inflating their population numbers and granting them more political representation. The recent acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, with its huge anticipated need for slave labor, only made the question of misrepresentation more acute.

 

"And whereas the said provisions were so manifestly unequal, at the time the constitution was formed, that they could have resulted only from the spirit of conciliation and compromise, which influenced the eastern states: because in consequence thereof, a representation of the states is produced, unjust and injurious in its operation, both as it regards the number of free inhabitants in the several states, and their property; as, in a state where the slavery of man is established by law, the slaves have no voice in the elections; -- but a planter possessing fifty slaves, may be considered as having thirty votes, while a farmer of Massachusetts, having equal, or greater property, is confined to a single vote…"

 

In this way, Massachusetts legislators explicitly condemned political misrepresentation more than slavery. Although Massachusetts had effectively abolished slavery in 1783, the state did not excoriate the practice of slavery in this document. Rather, it objected to the 3/5 Compromise on economic grounds, and not moral ones, because its trade-dependent economy clashed with that of the slave-based agrarian South.

 

To more accurately represent each state's population, Massachusetts thus proposed "That the senators of this Commonwealth, in the congress of the United States, be and they are hereby instructed, to take all proper and legal measures to obtain an amendment of the constitution of the United States, so that the representatives be apportioned among the several states according to the numbers of their free inhabitants…"

 

Caleb Strong, a Northampton lawyer, patriot politician, and ardent Federalist, served as Governor of Massachusetts between 1800-1807 and 1812-1816.

 

George Clinton served as Governor of New York between 1801 and June 30, 1804. His successor, Morgan Lewis (1754-1844), had defeated opponent Aaron Burr in the springtime gubernatorial election. Two weeks after his opponent assumed the New York Governorship, Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.

 

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