The Past Isn't Even Past: Republicans Still Trying To Reimpose the 3/5ths Rule And Succeeding

I think it was the essential Charles Pierce at Esquire who mentioned the great, great radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison the other day which reminded me of the two-part paper at the National Archives site about Garrison's critique of the Constitution and the corrupt process which deeply embedded the power of slavery into the very structure of the American government, before the war.  It is undeniable that with the persistence of some of those slave empowering features in the Constitution, today that their successors, not only in the South but wherever discrimination is pursued and empowered, many places in the United States, today.  And, today, many of those states are as Northern as could be, bulwarks of the Union side in the war.  Oddly, you never hear people from Union States defending the current cultural and political and social character of their non-Confederate culture as if it is supposed to be decisively dispositive, today.  Clearly, as those states support the neo-Confederacy of the Republican Party, today, they've retreated on their heritage.  But, then, again, how can they ever understand that unless they take into account the previous Northern acquiescence to slavery and the de-facto slave power that is still with us, today. 

One paragraph in the second part of the article by Paul Finkelman lays the facts out, succinctly.

Indeed, the slave states had obtained significant concessions. Through the three-fifths clause they gained extra representation in Congress. Through the electoral college their votes for President were far more potent than the votes of northerners. The prohibition on export taxes favored the products of slave labor. The slave trade clause guaranteed their right to import new slaves for at least twenty years. The domestic violence clause guaranteed them federal aid if they should need it to suppress a slave rebellion. The limited nature of federal power and the cumbersome amendment process guaranteed that, as long as they remained in the Union, their system of labor and race relations would remain free from national interference. On every issue at the convention, slaveowners had won major concessions from the rest of the nation, and with the exception of the commerce clause, they had given up very little to win these concessions. The northern delegates had been eager for a stronger Union with a national court system and a unified commercial system. Although some had expressed concern over the justice or safety of slavery, in the end they were able to justify their compromises and ignore their qualms.

The habit of thought among civil libertarians, moderates, etc. figure that the Confederacy lost the war and slavery ended, Garrison, himself, immediately after the war declared victory and was ready to move on to other things, even as his closest allies, such as Wendell Phillips, in the abolition struggle realized that until equality was established the struggle would never be over.  And they were right, that struggle continues, in much the same terms, today. 

Twelve years after the end of the war, with the Corrupt Bargain of 1876, which Rutherford Hayes traded ending reconstruction to Southern powers, the beginning of the construction of Jim Crow, what was lost with the end of legal slavery, things like the infamous 3/5th rule, were imposed through preventing freed slaves and their descendants from exercising the vote, reinstituting that provision in reality, though, through legalistic fiction, not in name.   

And the 3/5th provision was only part of a larger strategy by slave owners, particularly those in the South to enhance their power and their ability to keep Black people disempowered so their labor could be stolen by, first slave owners, after legal emancipation, through other strategies including keeping them from voting, what Jeff Sessions and other Republicans, in such states which were bulwarks of the Union as Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, today.   This, from the first part of the article shows how the deified James Madison was explicit in laying out his motives in the crooked deal.

Madison believed the "the people at large" were "the fittest" to choose the President. But "one difficulty . . . of a serious nature" made election by the people impossible. Madison noted that the "right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes." In order to guarantee that the nonvoting slaves could nevertheless influence the presidential election, Madison favored the creation of the electoral college. Under this system, each state was given a number of electors equal to its total congressional and senatorial representation. This meant that the three-fifths clause would help determine the outcome of presidential elections. Thus, the fundamentally antidemocratic electoral college developed, at least in part, to protect the interests of slavery.

That the electoral college has, several times in our history decided elections, in every case to the detriment of Black Americans*, members of other ethnic and racial minorities and has thwarted the interests of all but the wealthy, proves it, along with the other anti-egalitarian,  anti-democratic corruptions embedded in the Constitution are a living and evil legacy of the slave holding "founders" and those Northern "founders" who were so eager to protect their interests in commerce through the constitution.   

I don't think any assertions made about the Bill of Rights which doesn't take into account that the people pushing the interests of racists, those who want to exploit people who are kept from full, voting citizenship, those who want to play a kind of updated Southern Strategy are as able to exploit an ability to lie, to monopolize the modern mass media, is, also enabling that stranglehold of de facto slavery.   Yet the modern proxies for the Northerners who made those corrupt deals do that, all the time.   Black people are the target of the effort, Latinos, members of other minority groups and those who Republicans believe are more prone to vote for Democrats.   White people, liberals join others as the targets of the new-voter suppression of by and for the racists and the wealthy. 

The Constitution, as it stands today, as it is defined by the Supreme Court, as it is propagandized by everything from the ACLU and "free speech" industry, pseudo-historical movie and TV and Broadway costume dramas and musicals, to used by Republican-fascists, the NRA, Murdoch and Sinclair, is every much the slave document it was when William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips made their critiques of it based on its text, the history of its first decades of implementation and the written record left by Madison, Hamilton, John Jay, etc.  The brief period after the Second World War when, in reaction to the racism and other horrors of the Nazis, there was some liberalization is long gone.  It is one of the few comforts of having lost my parents that they are not here, today, to witness a United States ruled by Trump, Ryan, McConnell and where, even as Trump's treason with the Putin crime regime, his support for marching, torch carrying and murdering Nazis, roughly a third of the country still supports him and a dangerous percentage would even if he suspended the 2020 election. 

The evils embedded in the Constitution permitting racism, discrimination, economic exploitation, the propagandizing in support of all of those with the full power of the economic interests who benefitted from those,  brought us to the first Civil War, it brought us to Jim Crow, it is bringing us Jim Crow 2, it imposed Bush II and, a mere eight years later after we should have learned what a bad idea the electoral college can be, again, it brought us Trump.   

The rich Northerners who made those corrupt agreements with the slave power, James Madison, permanently disadvantaged states which didn't prevent Black People and members of other groups from exercising the right to vote.  It still does.  States which try to practice equality will always be at a disadvantage with those in which a racist white majority can reinstitute 3/5ths.  Democrats who gave up those then, Southern states through Johnson's great act of courage, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts are at a disadvantage by the Constitutional corruption that is dismantling both the Civil Rights ACT but, especially the Voting Rights Act.  Traditional American liberals who favor equality, the provision of an education, of access to affordable healthcare, and the other rights of Americans which has been effectively suppressed by the inordinate power it gives to the wealthy and to those who hate equality, are also chumps for that ancient corruption.  Groups like those I have been criticizing, the magazines of the alleged left I have been criticizing,  can well stand in for the Northerners who made those corrupt deals and the Northern dough-faces who supported the continuation of slavery and the Hayesian corruption that began the long nullification of Emancipation in the Jim Crow era. 

Note:  "The Constitution a pro-slavery compact; or, Extracts from the Madison papers, etc. selected by Wendell Phillips" is a real eye opening read, especially if you think of what he pointed out in the ante-bellum period in terms of today, as in this post. 

*  I would argue that was even the case in the first Corrupt Bargain, that John Quincy Adams had to make to become president, though he won the popular vote.  From the article:

  The Garrisonians believed that if they worked within the political system they were merely spinning their wheels, spending their money and time on a cause that was doomed. The Constitution was proslavery, the national government was controlled by slaveowners, and politics was a waste of time. A quick look at the presidency underscored their view. From 1788 until 1860, only two opponents of slavery, John Adams and John Quincy Adams, held the nation's highest office, and for only a total of eight years. On the other hand, slaveowners held the office for fifty of these seventy-two years, and doughfaces-northern men with southern principles—like James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce—held it the rest of the time.

This did not surprise the Garrisonians, who understood that the Constitution was heavily influenced by slaveowners. The Garrisonians did not necessarily see the Constitution as the result of a deliberate conspiracy of evil men; rather, they understood it to be the consequence of political give-and-take at the Convention of 1787.

And also:

Ironically, this antidemocratic system that Madison ultimately supported subsequently had a major impact on his career. Thomas Jefferson's victory in the election of 1800, and Madison's elevation to the position of secretary of state and heir apparent, would be possible only because of the electoral votes the southern states gained on account of their slaves. This point is made by Lynd in "The Abolitionist Critique," in Class Conflict, Slavery, and the United States Constitution, 178; and Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765–1820 (1971), p. 405. Many northerners believed the outcome of the 1812 election would have been different had it not been for the three-fifths clause, although this is probably not the case. However, without the three-fifths clause John Quincy Adams might have had more electoral votes than Andrew Jackson and might have been elected outright in 1824.