White Slaves, Black Slave Owners and the Three Fifths Compromise

On any given day it is likely some leftist college professor is using his position of power to influence young minds into viewing the Constitution in a negative light. Never teaching how it guarantees people’s rights and limits government’s power; today’s professors push their opinions that it was a document that protected the institution of slavery. Most kids have come up through high school even, believing that the United States was founded by rich white men who only founded the country for the purpose of propagating their own interests and protecting their power and influence. The founding fathers were slave owners and therefore they were racists. This is all the interpretation of left wing ideologues seeking to use the minds of our young men and women as vehicles of social change. While the issue of slavery certainly is a scar in the history of our nation, it is one that sadly is not being taught accurately.

There are many elements missing from the story of slavery in the United States. First and foremost, the left would have you believe that slavery was primarily a white imperialist institution that was used to secure the power of greedy white men in America. What students are unlikely to learn is that slavery existed all over the world and as early as the 1300 and 1400’s Arabs were purchasing slaves from African tribe leaders and selling them across the globe. Men were sold into servitude for salt, gold, wine and other goods. Secondly, African slaves were not even the first to be brought to American shores. The peoples of Eastern Europe known as The Slavs, which is where the word slave is derived from, arrived some time before African slaves. In fact, when African Slaves did arrive they were treated better and were worth far more than the white slaves. Africans that had been freed from servitude had actually been able to own these white slaves as well.  In fact, America’s first slave owner was a black man, and by 1830 over 3,775 black families owned black slaves. These are just a couple of examples of what is missing from our history books.

The truth about the Constitution and how it pertains to the issue of slavery is quite different than what the radical left wish to foster upon college students. While our founding fathers may have been slave owners, they were also men of conscience. It was the writing of the Constitution itself that actually paved the way for the abolishment of slavery. The founding fathers knew that a nation founded on freedom would not be able to maintain such an institution. In some ways you could argue that the abolishing of slavery is akin to the one hundred year plan of the communists to change our culture. The founding fathers knew that abolishing slavery would be no easy feat but nonetheless they took incremental steps in doing so.

One of these incremental methods written into the Constitution itself is the three fifths compromise. Ever a favorite clause of the leftists; it is one they often use to spark a reaction from unsuspecting students. Imagine if you will being lectured to about the institution of slavery and a professor callously proclaims that the founders only viewed blacks as being three fifths a person. That’s how they turn people into Anti American “change agents.” This is easy to do of course because these students generally know nothing about the Constitution or the subject of apportionment for representation. This pertains to how many representatives a state may have based on its population. Do you see where this is going?

The three fifths compromise was levied against the southern slave owning states as a “collective” method of counting the slaves. The “three fifths” meant that the slaves were only counted as three fifths of their population in order to limit the number of representatives the slave owning states could send to the congress. This limited the influence the slave states had in the legislature. They also did something that forced the slave owner states into an attitude of impartiality towards the institution itself. This provided “conflicting interests” if you will that eventually aided in the abolishing of slavery. They applied the same “three fifths” rule as a means of determining the south’s tax liability that was based on representation. These measures together were anti slavery provisions in the Constitution that worked to lessen the influence of slave states and the incentive to keep slavery alive as an institution. (The Heritage Guide to the Constitution)

While many in education are pushing the idea that the Constitution was written to protect slavery, and the three fifths compromise was a racist clause written to subjugate Africans, the truth is clearly the opposite. The writing of the Constitution paved the way for the freeing of the slaves and the abolishing of the institution from American shores. How many nations, at the time the thirteenth amendment was ratified, still maintained legal forms of slavery? Many nations to this day still do. In fact, the United States was one of the first to make slavery illegal and that is what our young people should be taught. If you are a young student tired of your leftist professor’s delusional diatribes, throw this at them next they say the founding fathers were racists.