Indiana’s Christian nationalist Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith stirred up controversy last month when he posted a video on social media defending the Constitution's infamous "three-fifths clause"—a compromise made by the framers that gave southern states greater power by counting three-fifths of each enslaved person when determining representation in Congress—as a "great move" that made sure "that slavery would be eradicated in our nation."
Beckwith's interpretation of the compromise was entirely wrong because instead of ensuring that "slavery would be eradicated," it actually ensured its survival for nearly another century.
On Thursday, Beckwith appeared on the "FlashPoint" program, where he defended his original argument and revealed, predictably, that he got it from Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton.
As Beckwith explained, he made his video in response to remarks delivered by members of the state’s Black Caucus citing the compromise during a debate over legislation to restrict diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in schools, state government, and health profession licensing.
"I know you have David Barton on a lot on the show," Beckwith said. "I called him because I know history too. I called him right after she goes off on this tangent of how the three-fifths compromise was used to vilify people like her in our founding. I said, 'David, I'm pretty sure that that was the opposite. Am I wrong in this?' He said, 'No, you're absolutely right. This was not a pro-slavery, this was an anti-slavery move by the north to keep the south from having more congressional representation.'"
"[Critical race theory] and DEI and the cultural narrative has shifted over the last 50 years [because] we have not corrected the truth," Beckwith continued. "So I did a video and I just explained it. I said the three-fifths compromise was a good thing. It laid the foundation for America to get rid of the evils of slavery years down the road. Had we not done that, we wouldn't have the Constitution, nor would we have freedom and liberty for all."
"Yes, it was a good thing," Beckwith insisted. "That is exactly what the founders were doing. ... Our founders were laying the groundwork for liberty for all I wanted to defend that. I'm not gonna let people impugn the character of the institutions of America because of revisionist history."
The only one engaged in "revisionist history" here is Beckwith.
His claim that the compromise "laid the foundation for America to get rid of the evils of slavery years down the road" is laughable and directly contradicted by Article I's prohibition on Congress passing any law to ban the slave trade for at least 20 years, and Article IV's Fugitive Slave Clause, which required that escaped slaves be returned to their owners.
More importantly, as noted above, the provision ended up strengthening the power of the slave-holding states, as Right Wing Watch explained in depth last year:
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the issue of how the proposed new government would deal with the institution of slavery was a pressing concern, as southern slave-holding states made it abundantly clear that they would not join any union that threatened the practice.
During the debate over how to allocate seat in the House of Representatives, which was to be based on population, southern delegates asserted that their slaves should be included in the count whereas northern anti-slavery delegates insisted that slaves should not be counted at all since they were legally regarded as property in slave states. Eventually, a compromise was reached in which seats in the House would be "determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."
While southern states did not get to count all of their slaves as part of their population in determining representation in the House, the compromise nevertheless gave them a distinct and powerful advantage.
As author David O. Stewart explained in his book, "The Summer of 1787: The Men Who Invented the Constitution":
The politicians in the East Room calculated instantly the value of the three-fifths rule. If congressmen were allocated on the basis of population, an owner of 100 slaves (such as Washington or Madison) would count as 61 people-himself plus three-fifths of his slaves. This effect would be extended to presidential elections when the delegates created the electoral college to choose the president. The additional southern representation in Congress, and added sway in voting for the president, would be significant. With almost 700,000 slaves in the southern states from Maryland to Georgia, and an allocation of one congressman for every 30,000 persons, the three-fifths ratio gave the South at least a dozen additional congressmen, and a like number of additional electoral votes. To defeat the small states and achieve representation based on population, Wilson paid a high price: powerful reinforcement of the slave interest.
Predictably, southern states used their increased power in Congress to protect their interests, much to the outrage of northern states, which quickly realized the error of the "compromise."
From "The Framers' Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution" by Harvard professor Michael Klarman:
Over time, the three-fifths compromise that the convention had approved became increasingly objectionable to many northerners. After the presidential election of 1800, some Federalists attributed Jefferson's narrow victory over John Adams to the three-fifths rule, which led them to disparage Jefferson as the "Negro president." Northerners' dissatisfaction with the Three-Fifths Clause only grew when, in 1803, President Jefferson consummated the Louisiana Purchase, which vastly extended the geographic scope of the United States, adding territory that was ripe for the expansion of slavery. In a letter written that year, Rufus King [an anti-slavery signer of the Constitution] called the Three-Fifths Clause one of the Constitution's "greatest blemishes," and he urged northerners to treat the clause as inapplicable to states added to the union as a result of Jefferson's bargain with Emperor Napoleon. King also insisted that northerners had been "injudiciously led to concede to this unreasonable provision" on the supposition that Congress "must resort to direct taxes," in combination with “the maxim that taxation and representation are inseparable." In 1804, the Massachusetts legislature proposed repeal of the Three-Fifths Clause, though only Connecticut and Delaware supported such a constitutional amendment.
By 1820, the Three-Fifths Clause was in effect translating into eighteen additional southern congressional representatives, and it had become a consistent target of northern criticism. That year, when Congress was consumed by heated sectional debate over the admission of Missouri to the union as a slave state, King acknowledged in the US Senate that "the disproportionate power and influence allowed to the slaveholding states was a necessary sacrifice to the establishment of the Constitution," and that "faith and honor stand pledged not to disturb it." Yet he insisted that "the extension of this disproportionate power to the new states would be unjust and odious"—especially since none of the Founders had "anticipated the fact that the whole of the revenue of the United States would be derived from indirect taxes which cannot be apportioned."
Beckwith's argument is precisely the sort of ignorance that results when people rely on the likes of David Barton for their historical knowledge, which is why Right Wing Watch has spent more than a decade tirelessly debunking his lies and working to correct the historical record.
