The 3/5th Clause
Kelly French
History 109

The three fifths compromise was a way for the north to balance out the rising south’s power without making it feel like they were completely draining the power from the southerners. The country had been split into two sections the north and the south. The north was more focused on industry and expansion, and had a rapidly growing population and people looking for new ways to advance and live. The north were a rapidly changing society and were adopting new methods of survival and leadership. Now the south on the other hand was a fixed economic society thriving on its sense of tradition. The south had been focused on a production type industry primarily crops or raw materials. They relied …show more content…
The south were aware of this due to the fact most of the south was made up of plantations and farms, with cities being rather scarce and mostly focused on trading their raw materials. The south then made the ideal that a slave should count as a citizen of the United States. With that number in mind the southerner’s population would have been fifty percent more than that of the north. The south had never counted them as people before though and slaves were referred to as property as opposed to people with rights and the ability to partake in actual representation. The south anyways proposed that slaves count rightfully as a human being when votes were being passed for new legislature and other ruling being voted on in the government. The government noticed that yes the slaves count as people, but as people without true freedom in their lives to vote as they wish thus creating an imbalance in ideals for the society. The northerners despite their disagreement with most southern culture and ideals saw no just way to cancel out the slaves vote without making it unbalanced for whichever …show more content…
It established that each slave becomes worth three fifths of a person, therefore evening out the votes leaving each side more or less at a greater stand still for debates and thus getting rid of any idea of a side being more heavily supported. Slaves were not given a vote however and this would eventually turn into the demanding that slaves should be treated more as people, crossed into the civil and up until the civil rights movement where the split between north and south is ever and most always present.
But say the three fifths compromise never happened and that each slave counted as their own person for the votes of the southern population. The United States standings would have been much different and would have called for much more controversial debates and law making. First off southern culture would rule. This means that the ideals of the south where it is less of a tertiary production culture would move back to secondary where they rely mostly on raw materials and trading products to foreign countries or for personal use in the economy. An actual plus this would have is that with the combination of the north’s economy and development, America would become its own harvesting and production plant where the northerners