Secretary Rice illustrates my point
On Sunday I pointed out Victor Davis Hanson's Washington Times column on historical amnesia and noted that in addition to the history we don't learn we (especially our kids) are also the victim of history that isn't so. John McCaslin's May 10 Washington Times column coincidentally provides a perfect example of the latter point:
In promoting democracy in her travels around the world, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice doesn't hesitate to share her personal roots with audiences.Secretary Rice's point about the "three-fifths" clause of the Constitution is a frequently repeated canard. The constitutional provision reduced slaves from counting in full for the purpose of allocating congressional representation. As Thomas West explains:Most recently, the Community of Democracies held its third meeting of foreign ministers in Santiago, Chile, discussing how democratic nations can better promote democracy around the globe.
"Democratization," Rice told the foreign ministers, is "not an event, it is a process. It takes many years, even decades to realize the full promise of democratic reform.
"For nearly a century after the founding of the United States, millions of black Americans like me were still condemned to the status below that of full citizenship," the secretary said. "When the Founding Fathers of America said 'We the People,' they did not mean me; many of my ancestors were thought to be only three-fifths of a man."
Said Rice: "It is only within my lifetime that the United States has begun to guarantee the right to vote for all of our citizens."
[T]he Constitution allowed Southern States to count three-fifths of their slaves toward the population that would determine numbers of representatives in the federal legislature. This clause is often singled out today as a sign of black dehumanization: they are only three-fifths human. But the provision applied to slaves, not blacks. That meant that free blacks-–and there were many, North as well as South–-counted the same as whites. More important, the fact that slaves were counted at all was a concession to slave owners. Southerners would have been glad to count their slaves as whole persons. It was the Northerners who did not want them counted, for why should the South be rewarded with more representatives, the more slaves they held?In Vindicating the Founders, West further notes that at the Constitutional Convention it was Southerners, not Northerners, who argued that slaves should count equally with white citizens in computing the state's representatives; Northerners argued that it was wrong "to give such encouragement to the slave trade as would be given by allowing [the Southern states] a representation for their Negroes." In short, for the purpose of congressional representation, the slave interests wanted to count slaves in full; the opponents of slavery did not want to count slaves at all. The three-fifths clause was a compromise that reflected the disagreement, reducing the representation of slave interests over what they otherwise would have been. This is not too difficult a point to expect sophisticated representatives of the United States to get right.
