What Your Fourth Grader Needs to Know (Revised and Updated) by E.D. Hirsch Jr

Author:E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

The three branches of the government—the executive branch, legislative branch, and judicial branch—have checks on one another. This means that no one branch of the government can gain supreme power.

Slavery and the “Three-Fifths Compromise”

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention also argued about the issue of slavery. Wealthy southerners owned plantations on which enslaved Africans planted and harvested crops such as rice, tobacco, and cotton. In 1787, about 750,000 people with African roots lived in America. These African Americans made up about one-fifth of the population. Almost 90 percent of those African Americans were slaves.

Northerners did not generally grow their crops on large plantations, so slavery was rarer in the New England states. During the Revolution, two states—Pennsylvania and Massachusetts—even made slavery illegal. Some northern delegates came to the Constitutional Convention with the hope that slavery would be abolished, or outlawed, everywhere.

Many of the debates at the convention concerned the future of slavery in the United States. Although enslaved people could not vote, they did end up influencing the House of Representatives. Delegates argued whether the official U.S. population count should include the enslaved people. If it did, it would increase the number of representatives the southern states sent to Congress. Southern states wanted every enslaved person counted; northerners did not want them counted at all. Finally, the delegates came up with a “Three-Fifths Compromise,” agreeing to count every five enslaved people as three people in a state’s population.

The delegates wrote several clauses regarding slavery. Congress was not allowed to pass any laws to control or regulate the slave trade for twenty years. Northern delegates accepted another clause that allowed slave owners to recapture runaways and bring them back from other states. Southern delegates allowed Congress to collect tax money from plantation owners for every enslaved person they owned.

In the end, all delegates accepted these compromises, but many were unhappy with them. George Washington (who owned slaves in Virginia) wrote to Thomas Jefferson (who also owned slaves in Virginia) that it was his strong wish “to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country might be abolished by law.”

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