Madison’s phrase—divested of two fifths of the man—sounds akin to the most common way that scholars, teachers, and anyone else talking about the three-fifths clause today describes what it did: that it counted each slave as “three-fifths of a person.” This phrasing suggests a shared presumption among whites that black people were only fractionally human. There is certainly no shortage of examples of whites arguing precisely this, especially in the antebellum era. And, at first glance, that appears to be what the three-fifths clause is doing. The fraction “three fifths” is in the text itself, and though the word “slave” is never used, the clause is clearly talking about enslaved Black people. There are understandable reasons why it is so easy to assume that defenders of slavery on some level had to believe that Black people, free or enslaved, were innately not fully human.
Yet this phrasing is, at best, misleading. So far as I can tell, commentators on the three-fifths clause in 1787 and 1788—its defenders as well as its critics—did not use this phrase. Madison’s line appears to have come the closest, and even he did not mean that Black people were only sixty percent human. In fact, his argument, like that of other defenders of the three-fifths clause, rested on the assertion that enslaved Black people were three things simultaneously: subordinates to whites, legally the “property” of their owners, and human beings, through and through. Southerners like Madison had a vested interest in acknowledging that enslaved people were people, since states with large enslaved populations—Madison’s home state of Virginia most of all—would gain greater representation in the House and the Electoral College through the inclusion of three-fifths of the enslaved population.
Denials of Black humanity, free and enslaved, coexisted with explicit acknowledgment that enslaved Black people, though legally deemed “property,” were people. Either could be invoked at different moments by the Constitution’s defenders (who called themselves federalists) as well as its critics (whom federalists pejoratively labeled antifederalists) to drive home specific arguments they sought to make. But arguments that enslaved people were people, and those claiming they were “property,” did not divide cleanly along political or sectional lines. When we presume that arguments in defense of slavery and denials of full Black personhood had to go hand-in-hand, we can easily miss or minimize how important it was for those defending the Constitution’s protections for slavery to acknowledge, and at times even emphasize, the personhood of the enslaved. Closer attention to the debate over the three-fifths clause during the public ratification debate reveals how central the personhood of the enslaved was to the Constitution’s protections for slavery, and how explicit slavery’s defenders were that Southern states stood to gain by it.