Constitutional Convention Adopts the Three-Fifths Clause

At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, delegates agreed that enslaved people would count as three-fifths of a person for apportioning Congressional representation and direct taxes. Madison's notes show Gouverneur Morris denounced it as giving slaveholders political power derived from their victims: 'the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connect