Subject: Re: Our Founding Fathers Said What?
[The three-fifths clause is a] "solemn mockery of and insult to God" and "involved the absurdity of increasing the power of a state ... in proportion as that state violated the rights of freedom."

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That single quote is one of the more crucial factoids that every American needs to learn or relearn about American history. I suspect most of us educated before probably maybe 1990 had a curriculum of American history one might term the Immaculate Deception... In other words, approaches for teaching American history essentially started with a permanent moral mulligan for American society. In the grand scope of history, sure, America and Americans might have done some things THEN that look horrible NOW by modern standards. But America and Americans ALWAYS tried to do the RIGHT thing in the context of the times of the past -- some of those things just didn't age well but by golly, when we wisened up, we fixed those bad things.

Slavery was a hot topic in America even prior to 1776, much less 1789 and 1860. Correspondence and letters to local newspapers are replete with opinions expressing the immorality of slavery. Debates that led up to US Version 2.0 in 1789 discussed slavery in exactly these morality compromising terms that would be current today. The founding fathers who proposed the three-fifths language and accepted it in finalizing the Constitution EXPLICITLY understood the immorality and hypocrisy of claiming to found a nation on the idea of personal liberty while simultaneously offering power to southerners based on slave headcount while denying those slaves rights and representation.

The founding fathers were not saints for the generations. They devised a mostly great set of counterbalancing powers and processes ideal for avoiding tyranny and a mostly great set of rules for adapting that system to new circumstances over time. They also made some horrible compromises when choosing the starting point for that system to begin operating. And they failed to understand how corrosive those other compromises (an electoral college, a two-vote per state Senate, initial parliamentary habits that introduced and calcified a flawed two-party system) would be over generations.


WTH