NY Times Comes Out In Favor of Not Counting the Slaves as PersonsThis should
get them in trouble with their PC base:
The first Constitution took for granted that enslaved people could not vote, but counted each slave as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. This inflated the voting power of slaveholders and gave them much more influence in legislative matters than their actual numbers warranted. No American would knowingly tolerate such an arrangement today.So apparently the Times thinks that slaves should not have counted as people at all?
As an aside,
Captain Ed (talking mostly about the real subject of the editorial, which is that prisoners should be counted as citizens of the area where they resided when they committed their crimes, rather than citizens of the area where they are incarcerated) repeats the canard that the three-fifths compromise was somehow shameful. I don't buy it. As in most things solved by compromise, there were valid arguments on both sides. Not counting the slaves at all would have been undercounting, but counting them as complete persons would have given more power to the slaveholding states.
