Every time this discussion comes up it just makes me sad how many of our citizens can only think in sound bites and can’t look deeper into historical occurrences. Enslaved people weren't 3/5 of a person, they were not persons at all under the Constitution, they were chattel, personal property. The fact that they had no vote for said representatives means they should have been counted as zero. What it did was to give white people in southern slave states an additional 3/5 representation for each enslaved person in the state. The reality is that it provided a hell of an incentive to import more enslaved persons in the 20 years the slave trade was allowed to continue. It’s called a “compromise” because the union might not have formed if the South stuck to their guns and just stayed independent.
The overriding discussion is that a union founded on such inequities is tainted from the outset. That’s the part the racist right hates so they twist it as a good thing, because the southern whites didn’t get a full count for each enslaved persons, but again, it should have been zero, the compromise gave the southern slave states way more representation in the House of Representatives than they deserved, and in fact prolonged slavery for decades leading to the civil war, which was primarily about…wait for it…slavery.
https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2025/04/28/a-great-move-or-revisionist-history-indianas-beckwith-sparks-three-fifths-compromise-debate/