It does not surprise me that Paul Finkelman (cited in Allen Guelzo’s article in National Review) argues as he does—he’s long twisted history to promote hostility toward the Aerican Founders. What is more surprising is that most of the Constitution’s defenders, including Prof. Guelzo, have overlooked the actual reasons for the three-fifths clause, which, of course, is Exhibit A in the case against the Constitution.
In the course of researching my 2015 article on the use of financial phrases in the Constitution, I uncovered those actual reasons. They should not be so obscure: the apportionment formula flowed from the framers theories about representation and wealth rather than from any desire to accommodate slavery per se. Here is the relevant excerpt from my article. What the Constitution Means by “Duties, Imposts, and Excises”—and Taxes (Direct or Otherwise), 66 Case Western Res. L. Rev. 297 (2015). The many footnote citations are omitted:
Agreeing on the general principle of apportionment was less difficult than settling on a formula applying it. The Confederation system of allocating requisitions by state land values had proved impractical. Apportionment by actual taxes paid seemed to be likewise unworkable. A new formula was needed.
The starting point in the search was collective agreement that each state’s contribution in federal taxes would be a function of (1) the state’s population (2) and its wealth. Fortunately, experience strongly suggested that, for the most part, wealth followed population. In other words, population usually was a good proxy for wealth. Madison reported Connecticut’s William Samuel Johnson as telling the Constitutional Convention that “wealth and population were the true, equitable rule of representation; but … these two principles resolved themselves into one; population being the best measure of wealth.”
What was true in general, however, was not true always. Slavery created a valuation problem. Although few of the framers thought slavery was a good thing, slavery was a fact and they had to address the conundrum it created. The conundrum was this:
*Slaves contributed to a state’s wealth, so if one of two similar states with the same free population also contained slaves, then the state containing slaves would produce more tax revenue, but
*although slaves produced wealth, they did not produce as much wealth as an equal number of free people. This was because slaves could not sell their labor or talents in the free market, where incentives for production were strongest and labor and talents fully valued. Thus, given two similar and equally-populous states, one entirely free and the other slaveholding, the state entirely free would produce more tax revenue.
To attune state representation to projected tax contributions, therefore, the framers needed to calculate the tax productivity of each slave as some fraction of the tax productivity of each free person. As it happened, the Confederation Congress already had estimated this fraction as three-fifths. This resulted in a formula of T = Pf + (3/5 x Ps) where T was a state’s tax burden, Pf the state’s free population and Ps the state’s slave population. The three-fifths formula is sometimes said to be the product of pure racism, but the record does not support that. Madison’s summary of the 1783 congressional debates that produced the formula show that the considerations leading to it were purely economic. They included the respective imports and exports from states relying or not relying on slavery; the effect of climate differences on productivity; the levels of consumption of free and unfree persons; and, most importantly, the fact that slaves did not have the same positive incentives to produce that motivated free people. During the deliberations, moreover, the term “free white inhabitants” was altered to drop the word “white,” thereby including at full parity the 60,000 free African Americans then living in the United States. Also included at full parity were Indians who paid taxes–that is, those subject to direct state rather than tribal authority.
American slavery was the product of racism (among other causes), but the three fifths rule was not. Rather, it was an acknowledgment that people–of any race–produce more wealth, and therefore more tax revenue, when they operate in free markets rather than under conditions of command and control.