Lt. Governor Micah Beckwith recently took to X to post a short video denouncing the “DEI radical revisionist history” taught by “professors at woke schools.” His target: the idea that the 3/5 Compromise “was some terrible thing in our past.” This compromise—one of the compromises through which the U.S. Constitution was established in 1787—incorporated this language into Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall 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.”
Beckwith insists that this compromise was “a great move by the North to make sure that slavery would be eradicated in our nation,” that its instigators “were fighting for equality for all,” and that they “helped to root out slavery and lead us into a more perfect union.” And he claims to be defending the teaching of “the history of what actually happened.”
But it is obvious that he seeks to whitewash what actually happened in the name of an anti-intellectual celebration of “American Greatness.”
The very language of the compromise explicitly incorporated four distinct classes of people who most definitely were not “equal”: “free persons,” “those bound to Service for a Term of Years,” i.e., indentured servants, “Indians not taxed,” and “three fifths of all other Persons.” Who were these “all other persons?” They were the roughly 450,000 human beings enslaved throughout America, mainly but not exclusively in the South. The compromise allowed for 3/5 of the total population of these enslaved persons in each state to count for the sake of representation in the House of Representative, while also allowing that these persons–the property of the “free persons” who legally owned them–were without any of the rights mentioned in the Constitution.
It is true that some drafters of the Constitution from Northern states thought slavery immoral, and some others hoped that in time it would fade from the scene (Jefferson also hoped this). But not a single one of them opposed slavery as a matter of principle, and every single one of them embraced the Constitutional provision that explicitly incorporated a group of “other persons” who were not really legal persons at all.
It was not “Northerners” who crafted the 3/5 Compromise. It was James Madison, himself a Virginia plantation owner who held title to over 100 enslaved persons and chose not to free a single one in his last will and testament. Madison was a brilliant thinker and a creative statesman, and he was not an evil man. Like many of his colleagues, he was somewhat tormented by the obvious contradiction between the Declaration of Independence’s “all men are created equal” and the institution of slavery itself. And in Federalist 54 he offered a tortured defense of the 3/5 Compromise, insisting that enslaved persons were persons whose lives and bodies ought somehow to be respected—and who should “count” somehow—but were also a lesser status of persons, and so should count 3/5 for the sake of representation, but not at all when it came to selecting representatives.
Lt. Governor Beckwith insists that this Compromise “helped to root out slavery and lead us into a more perfect union.” I am not sure what he means by “helped.”
The compromise helped to build support for the Constitution and its rhetoric of “a more perfect union”– by codifying slavery, even without naming it, and not by rooting it out. The work of “rooting it out” required the efforts of generations of abolitionists and human rights activists, who were routinely attacked for voicing their opposition to slavery. Many of these activists were African-Americans, like Frederick Douglass, who were able to oppose slavery only after escaping from it. As Douglass brilliantly stated in his famous 1852 speech, “What To The Slave is the Fourth of July,” he was by law a thief, for by escaping enslavement he had absconded with himself, the “rightful” property of another. If Beckwith wishes to understand this better, he should re-read the 1857 Dred Scott decision authored by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, which declared that “Negroes” were not full citizens, and that a slave once was a slave everywhere and forever.
The 3/5 Compromise remained the Constitutional law of the land until a violent Civil War was fought and won by the Union, the secessionist Confederate States of America was defeated, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery, and thus the category of “other persons.” This happened in 1865, seventy-eight years after the Constitution itself was drafted.
I have been teaching about all of this, at Indiana University, Bloomington, for almost 40 years. What Beckwith says about “woke professors” and “DEI history” is a slanderous travesty of the actual historical education offered to young American students by my colleagues and I.
Citizens of the U.S. ought to feel proud to know that over its long history, generations of activists have been inspired by the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence to fight for the expansion of rights and for the democratization of the Constitution. But it is those who struggled to make the U.S. “a more perfect union” who ought to be recognized, and not those who stood in their way. This does not require demonizing the Framers of the Constitution or the compromises they made. But it does require honesty about who actually did what, and to whom, and how it is that we now possess the freedoms we cherish.
To deny the history of the struggle for freedom is to diminish both the history and the freedom.
Why would Beckwith, or anyone else, want to do this?
Jeffrey C. Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington.
This piece was originally published on Democracy in Dark Times on April 27, 2025.
The Constitution of Freedom: A Reply to Micah Beckwith’s Misreading of the 3/5 Compromise